The Return

First of all, my apologies to all for going silent for so long. I was fighting a battle on two fronts.

First of all, my laptop went down some months ago and I had to go through the process of getting an older laptop repaired and refurbished while I hunted down the extended warranty pertaining to the current one.

It took some time to restore some of the data from my hard drive—being a poor author I had to do all of the dirty work, myself. Once restored, the old laptop gimped along requiring a certain amount of nursing and coaxing.

As it turned out the “new” laptop (hurriedly purchased as the last display model while under deadline duress) was covered by a special service enhancement warranty (a fancy sort of laptop recall) and I was eventually able to get it back in much better working order.

Of course it typically takes a minimum of several days to restore the hard drive and get all of the software re-registered and back to proper working order with passwords and specific configurations back in place.

This is assuming that the Windows Update processes don’t throw a monkeywrench into the processes. Which it did for three different installs.

Complicating matters further, my old ISP topped its usually litany of glitches with the meltdown of my 2nd DSL modem, necessitating the purchase of a third in less than 2 years. Unfortunately no DSL modems were available outside of an 80-plus mile round trip to purchase one at their store. It was the last straw.

So I’ve changed ISPs necessitating a new round of password conversions and account transfers and what-not—a process still somewhat in process.

All of this would have been challenging enough but there were home repairs, landscaping, and major overhaul of the furnace and central air conditioner to occupy my time.

Add to the mix the death of my pancreas, the deterioration of my L4 and L5 vertebrae, and the resurgence of cardiac ventricular abnormalities, well, life on-line has been put on a rather lengthy hold.

Not looking for sympathy, you understand. More like absolution, forgiveness, or at least understanding. The good news is: I think I’m about caught up. I’ve worked my way through most of the more than 700 emails in my inbox and finally updated my homepage to reflect certain changes that have transpired in the past several months.

Now if I can only figure out how to tie my newsgroup/journal/blogs together and sync them to one source…

WMS