Hmmmm, I've been quiet for a while. Let me explain.

As of January or so, the computer in my garage that mahlen.org ran on for many years would no longer start. Probably a burned out power supply, and it was a weird computer from 1998, so I was unclear on the availability of a replacement. "Great!", thought I, "I've been working on a port of mahlen.org to Ruby on Rails for a while, so I'll just host at a real hosting service for a change (i.e., not inside my house), and lower my electric bill to boot."

Then our main computer, the one that I had written that port on, and also the one Diane used for grad school, that very important computer, stopped booting due to hard disk errors. Any recent backups? Ha, I say, ha! Oh, it was to laugh. After giving some serious money to the nice folks at Drive Savers, we had our data back. But my MySQL setup was hidden from me. So, to get the Ruby on Rails port of mahlen.org working, i would have had to recreate a bunch of state. Plus, there were a few months of posts that were still trapped on the old computer in the garage, and I was afraid they might be lost forever. It was all very depressing, and I was rather disinclined to think about it all.

And did I mention that I was trying to get up to speed at Google during all this? Just a bit busy there, too.

So, I now officially give up. Now that My Esteemed Employer has some form of almost all the things my site did, I'm going to stitch together my site from various online services, and let other people worry about backups and restarting machines and so on.

More soon.