About a week ago I upgraded this site to the latest version of Movable Type and broke the comments once again. It seems to do that every time I upgrade. (At least I'm not alone in this boat.) I had some time at nights and this weekend to spend diving deep into the bowels of MT to scrub clean my major templates and make sure they are using all spiffy new tags, while creating a clean dummy site with default templates to figure out why the comments were going awry. To make the long hours that it took a little shorter in explanation, the main index and all the individual pages on this site are now working correctly and looking something like I want them to. As comments spur me on to write more posts here, I'll be looking forward to getting more of them ("that's a, I say, that's a hint, son").

As I have time, I plan to try and finally clean up some of the archives, including fixing the travelogues that I migrated into here. Now that MT template tags have become a de facto programming language (complete with the almighty variables and if/then statements), I should be able to finally make those look decent again.

A couple of work colleagues mentioned that they had set up a blog to keep their family informed of their Malaysian adventures, and J mentioned that I also had a blog, to which they responded, "Oh, you just created one, too?" Yeah, about six years ago. Whippersnappers. There's over 1400 posts here, although half of those are imported into this blog from things I did before the blog was established itself. You see, I'm old skool, although I went to a different old skool than some. I started trying to communicate to the unseen masses back in 1993 with a reading diary called "First Impressions" that I would send out by email. That lasted for five years until I couldn't keep the pace of reading up with my new graduate school work. I briefly set up a blog then (in 1998) on GrokSoup, but didn't keep up with it. After graduating with my MFA, I started work as a Online Community Coordinator that led me into discovering more about what the world of blogs had come to, and immediacy began in 2002. I'd celebrate an anniversary if I could only figure out what would be the right date.