I like my desperation quiet, thank you very much.

I made a rule for myself very early on in writing in this thing that I wasn't going to write about the actual creation/management of it. It seems extraordinarly tedious and boring to write about how one is going to write about something or the look and feel (design) of the very thing that you are designing. I suppose I wanted to avoid a weird sort of meta-blog since I am annoyed by such things. It is like talking to some one who only discusses some new feature of his or her appearance simply to get you to comment on how cool it is: LOOK AT MY HAIR! LOOK AT MY TATTOO! LOOK AT MY LIP RING! Bleh. That's too much unquiet desperation for me.

With that in mind, I must ask you to bear with me here, becase I do have some necessary explaining to do on the sudden change of appearence of good old SigNo.

I've been mouthing off lately that a blog or an online journal (that's how I prefer to think of this thing) is like a pet: you get used to it being around and need to feed it and clean up after it on a regular basis. Like all analogies, of course, this one fails miserably when you get down to it, but there is something apt in the connection: it tends to describe the care that one can give to such things even though they are simply electric pulses streaming out from your finger prints to become stored electric impulses streaming out from some unknown server stuck away in some unknown closet. A sort of desire to care for such a thing creeps up after a while: to buy it a nice collar or give a special treat.

Lately the old dog has been getting a bit shaggy in that I've found a great deal of limitations in the software I chose for keeping the thing fed inadquate. Basically the program only runs on the PC that sits in combination chow-hall/office, and try as I might, I cannot get it to go out and find emails that I clandestinely send to it for publication purposes.

I guess my pet has grown to the size that I have to keep it in a barn now, because I (horror of horrors) have switched away from my ecclectic blogging program and have moved to using blogger.com. It still stores the files for the blog on my own server, but I get to use their web interface to publish. I know folks out there with more discerning tastes will tell me to use some other more flexible blogging environment.


The problem with making such a switch, however, is that you can't easily tranfer content from one database system to the next. (Blog software are basically simple databases if you didn't know.) This requires one to start afresh and if you want to find the old entries, you will have to go to the old archive. Sorry there are so many on that list. I suppose I should have just gone with a month-to-month list rather than a weekly one.

To keep up with animal analogy this change is like

• cleaning the cat's stinking litter box
• getting the dog groomed
• shearing the sheep
• de-horning the cow
• putting more brine shrimp eggs in the brine shrimp tank

Take your pick.