Hello and thank you to all of my readers, large and small. 2003 was the year that I got on the blogging bandwaggon–what a wild ride it's been.

At first I struggeled with blogging. While written in the English language (for me anyway), blogging is a different medium for communication. That means different rules and different things to say. It means that you make mistakes and say you're sorry and it also means cheering when others applaud your words. With that said, thanks to all in the blogsphere for linking to me at one time or another. That form of praise, however faint, kept me going. No one likes to shout in a vacuum with no hope of being heard. To that end, I'm resolving to double my subscription list with people I've never heard of that say things I don't understand. Listening to other voices will make think.

People

I would like to thank “Dave Winer”, first and foremost. His continuing efforts to support simple, easy, user-friendly methods of personal public communication is inspiring. Dave, your unabashed love for users is a model we can all aspire to follow.

Tammy Kirks, my wife, gets the next slot on the list. Tammy's always been pro-blogging, even though she didn't understand it at first. She was completely behind my “mini-pilgrimage” to Boston for BloggerCon–a life changing event for me.

Tim Smith is next. Tim works tirelessly on a variety of technology projects outside of his normal “9-5” job so that others can enjoy something they never though possible. Tim made the first version of HTV Magazine, a website run by broadcast journalist students in Springfield, MO. “HTV” has become a model in student journalism, winning awards for the past 9 years straight.

Finally, the blogosphere, wrapped into one, gets my gratitude. If you read or have read the site or RSS feed, posted a comment or linked to an item of mine, you have made my life richer. Thank you.

Tomorrow? A summary of 2004 goals

Move to the new server is complete. Here's a post for fun and enjoyment…

I haven't written much lately, and I certainly haven't linked much. For that, I'm sorry. I'm spending more time with a fledgling business wrestling with a thirst for change.

I've watched with interest Dave Winer's changes in Scripting News, his weblog about scripting software and technology. For the last year or two, it's been less about scripting and more about Dave. That's fine with me. Dave makes me think more about the “why's” when I do something than the “how's”. That's why I read it every day.

The header picture changed. That's good too. The other photo was a source of juvenille stress for everyone. Dave's worked through it and has produced a better result: he's relating his life to the Web through his website. It's made me once again question the “why” of my weblog, and not the “how”.

I'll be spending the rest of the month transitioning my weblog to one of two pieces of software: Movable Type or Manila. MT is free for me as a non-commerical users. Manila is $899. Both offer strengths. Opinions?

I have seen the light about my interaction with the blogosphere. I've grown out of the “link to everyone, post everything” phase. There's too much that's good *and* bad to make those kinds of rationalizations with everything I read. I'll spend more time writing introspectively, something I enjoy more than posting news from other sites.

More as it happens…

It's 10:58 here in Springfield and I am one tired individual. I've spent the afternoon chasing a problem that makes no sense to me anymore: Radio isn't working right.

My solution? Reinstall, restore from same day's backup. Hope that missing posts can someday come back.

I think that I will “restart” the blog after BloggerCon. I'll keep most of the content that is searched on, like “Weblogs and Customer Service” or “Open Letter to the RSS Community” (linked later).

Time for sleep. Two days until we leave for Boston. Haven't packed.

Test post 8: reinstall on MacOS X using simple reinstall instructions.

Here's what an actual California recall ballot looks like. Link to scanned ballot (804×638 px jpeg), Discuss (Thanks, Gabe!) [Boing Boing Blog]

iTunes Music Store Sells Ten Millionth Song (08-Sep-2003; 2K) [TidBITS]

I heeded some advice on Thursday last week. My little voice was telling me to make a backup of my Radio install. I stopped right then, shut Radio down, opened Stuffit Deluxe and archived the whole folder. I then copied the folder to different drive partition and restarted Radio. It was a good thing I did. (insert forboding music here)

I decided on Saturday (9-6) to open Matt Neuberg's book about Frontier and play a little. I thought I was being careful not to change anything, copying things to the workspace table before mucking about. Wrong. I did something somewhere and created an error rendering the weblog posts. This makes sense because I was reading the rendering code in Radio, trying to get an idea of how pages are rendered and when. This unfortunate mistake was just an annoyance. I killed the offending Radio, dumped it to the trash, opened the backup and unstuffed it. Restarted with the good Radio, and here we are.

Always make a backup…