I need to reply to so many people. I have left everyone hanging. Now it becomes an insurmountable task.
It’s left over from birthday wishes, you see. I was working on my birthday, late into the night. There was about a two-and-a-half week stretch there during which I essentially did nothing but work and parent. Weekends, evenings, you name it.
I can think way back to the early days of tech—when the mere concept of email and mobile phones was futuristic—and I was telling people all the way back then, in posts very similar to this one, “sorry everyone, I’ve just been so busy.”
And I have, that’s legit. But what do I have to show for it? What’s that, thirty-five years of being not-caught-up-enough-to-reply, of just trying to keep my hat on as I race through the wind to try to… what?
Early on, it was to try to ensure a better future for myself.
That having failed to really materialize, it’s now to try to ensure that the bills are paid (including one very large student loan bill that will not be paid while I continue to breathe).
It was a bad deal.
All of the adults and the counselors and the advisors were wrong. I should have simply slacked off and replied. I’d be far richer, both socially and financially. The veiled threat was that you prioritize the work or someday you’ll suffer. The truth was that if you prioritize the work, you’ll suffer all the time.
But now, bills incurred, it’s too late to do much about it. The naive teen couldn’t have done anything else. Now the adult realizes just how brazenly he was lied to, albeit by people who didn’t realize they were lying.
— § —
I have had so many websites over the years. So . many . websites.
Some of them are immortalized here, having been rolled into this one, given that they were all blogs that happened in chronological order. In a sense, they were all the same site—i.e. from the visitor’s perspective, they were all “Aron’s blog.”
Under the hood, they were being rebuilt just about every year because technology marches on (and so do threats due to technology that would otherwise take a two-year-old site down, particularly in the early days).
But there are also multiple sites that weren’t ever rolled into this one.
Tonight, for no particular reason, I spent a bunch of time playing with a local instance of Apache getting one that I’m particularly fond of visible again, if only to myself. It was a shared blog I ran with my friends for six months in 2004. Eventually they trailed off (not everyone ultimately has the compulsion to blog forever) and I returned to blogging on my own individual site.
There are hundreds of posts there that no longer see sunshine, but I can’t really migrate them here, as the format was a group, talking to each other in successive posts that were woven together.
Thing is, even though I have it running locally after spending an evening on it, it can’t ever go online again. The site was run on Graymatter, a Perl-based CMS without a database.
Imagine that—a database-free CMS written in Perl!
I have no appetite to try to figure out if it can be secured. I doubt whether it can—I could invest a hundred hours in the underlying guts only to realize in the end it was pointless.
I could recreate the whole thing in WordPress or something, painstakingly duplicating the HTML and CSS on the front end.
But the result would be fake.
I am drawn to it enough to spend hours bringing it up just to look at it for a few minutes precisely because it is a historical artifact, of a particular time. The cadence with which things load as Apache cranks through Perl, server-side includes, and the odd PHP script has a particular flavor that’s of a piece with the site itself.
— § —
Sometimes I miss the very earliest days of my blog. Not because of what the reader’s experience was but because of what the writer’s experience was. Call it the “Twitter of 2000.”
At the time, being a hardcore Linux evangelist and open source contributor, I worked almost entirely at the command line most of the time. And my blog was populated by a bunch of local scripts that would append to locally stored, structured source files, then parse out HTML and dump it via FTP to my host. So I’d be working, right in flow, and just type something like:
blog post “What a nice day I’m having” “Crazy how the sun shines.|Crazy to write so much code while the sun is shining.”
I’d smash the enter button and in the background, up would go a post titled “What a nice day I’m having” a couple of paragraphs long.
That’s how I ran off so many posts early on, and why so many of them were just a few paragraphs long. Take that, Twitter. I was microblogging unwittingly in 2000.
Thing is, it wasn’t like today’s CMS systems, where making a post is this whole production. You’ve got to log in, which means not just opening a browser and visiting a URL and entering a username and a long, “secure” password, but also completing a captcha and then TOTP, and then when you’re finally in you’ve got to create a new item, and then you’ve got to type in this full-blown editor window staring back at you. And on today’s giant displays, you’ve got to get in a good thousand words just to make it feel like you’re not wasting everyone’s time.
And so, in the end, whatever you do post isn’t in-flow any longer. It just can’t be. You’ve been thinking about it while you go through the labor of logging in, and for the two hours of resistance that you felt about taking the time to log in. And you don’t do it very often, because it takes half an hour, even if you don’t proofread at all and leave the typos and miskeys in place.
— § —
All of this time wasted doing things that used to take eight seconds are what both job and life increasingly taste like, and why I’m as slow to reply to everyone as ever—if not moreso. Now I have two teens, and also everything in the world is as slow as molasses, the promise of technology having largely failed to materialize.
— § —
I don’t know, I guess I’m just old already.