Category: Site Info

I have no idea if anybody is out there reading this, but welcome back, one way or another.

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I suck.

I’ve all but abandoned this site. I’ve seen the comments, I’ve read the emails and I know: I haven’t been giving this site and my loyal few readers the attention they deserve. My professional and personal life have been chaotic — death in the family, wedding in the family, acquisition at work that required a truckloads of hours (but was a good thing), periodic illness, family obligations, professional obligations, etc… . It’s just been a nutty last several months, and the likelihood of it getting better anytime soon is fairly slim.

That being said, I wanted everybody to know I was I alive (as I’ve gotten that email, too). I rarely turn on my computer in the evenings when I get home, preferring to spend time with my family and relax. I rarely post on Facebook (which annoys people as well, I know), and we all know my general feelings on twitter.

I can say that I’m going to post more on here, that I’m going to commit time to this, but, honestly, I don’t know if I can or will. Not all of us can be as cool as Jon (I kid, but Jon is a cool guy, he really is). And if I had more free time, I’d probably spend it getting bendblogs.com back up and running as that did more for the local blogger community than most of the projects I’ve worked on.

Or I’d do none of the above, as nobody knows where life is going to lead.

Meanwhile, I’m going to do what I’ve always done and take things a day at a time and see where that takes me. Hopefully that will bring me back to this site again so I can start writing some more (which I dearly miss), but we’ll just have to see what happens. Thanks again to all of you who are still checking-in.

I’m trying to get things organized a bit for this year’s annual UtterlyBoring.com March Madness NCAA Pick ’em (our sixth year doing this — see some previous years here, here, here, and here) and am working on collecting prizes for the winners. Does anybody have anything would like to contribute or know anybody (or a business) who would like to donate a prize?

As usual, all prize submitters will get text link on the tourny page (which will be linked from the front page of this site for several weeks as well as bendblogs.com for a couple weeks), and I’ll rotate 125*125 pixel ad banners for your company or blog or whatever during the duration of the tournament.

Anything can be submitted for a prize, as I’m pretty casual, as are the folks who participate in the tournament. If you have anything fun, weird, stupid, interesting or cool you want to throw into the prize pot, by all means let me know (comment here with your email address so I can contact you or e-mail me at utterlyboring {at} gmail {dot} com).

We had a fairly major server outage yesterday. I won’t go into the details of it all, as I haven’t slept much in the last 24 hours and I’m utterly exhausted (yesterday was one of the nastiest days of my life, and this was just one of many things to go nuts yesterday). I’m slowly getting things back up and running 100%. If you notice anything weird, comment below (or even if you want to express your sympathies, that’d be fine, too). If commenting’s not working, email me at utterlyboring at gmail dot com.

Update: Still at it. Had some issues crop up overnight, but hopefully I’ll get this resolved permanently soon (and I’m seriously considering getting out of the hosting biz — I have enough stress in my life as it is).

You may or may not know, but when I first started blogging, I blogged on the jake.orty.com domain. I started this blog back in ’02 during a brief time of unemployment. Once I found work, I neglected the blog for several months, until I finally got around to posting again (was still at jake.orty.com back then — hadn’t moved to utterlyboring.com yet). When I got back to posting again, I had bulldozed the previous archives from the brief blip in May that I was posting here.

I finally got around to getting on the Web archive and getting my old archives, and now have May 2002 back in my archives. Most of the links in those old entries are long dead, but at least they’re back in the database.

Now I just need to get my dozens of old dailyemerald.com columns into this database, since they’re not accessible on the Web anywhere. I was an online columnist back before “blogging” was all the rage. I’ve been writing online since the 90s, you young whipper-snappers (get off my lawn) and it’d be nice to have that all in one place. But I figured I should probably ask the Emerald’s permission first. so that’s coming next.