I’d posted a short entry at lunch time, but hadn’t refreshed the main page to show the new article. When I tried refreshing the page a couple of minutes ago, as my blog page loaded, it was redirected to blogrolling.com, which appears to be an abandoned site (that is, it’s up for sale). I still had a couple of links to two blogrolls that used to be hosted at that site, so fixing it was as easy as commenting out the links . . . but it’s weird that just showing a link allows that link to redirect the linking page. I haven’t seen that before.

My apologies to anyone who tried loading the page over the last hour or two!

To my mild surprise, spam comments only accumulated at the usual rate, so it wasn’t a huge problem to wade through them to ensure that there weren’t any real people’s comments mis-marked as spam. The vacation was great — but too short — and we had lots of low-key fun.

Now, I’ve got all the stuff to catch up on that happened last week, so blog posts will happen, just delayed a bit by all the other things that need catching up.

I’m on vacation, which means I’m much less likely to be near a computer. I’ll probably post a few items, but expect it to be fairly quiet here for the coming week.

I’d planned to have a normal slate of Saturday morning blog posts up by the time I headed out for the day, but a series of thunderstorms had a conflicting plan for my time. Oh, well, in the spirit of fairness, I’ll refund all subscribers a full day’s credit. You’ll see the credit show up on your next bill.

Seven years ago, after being an avid reader of other peoples’ blogs for quite some time I was given the opportunity to have my own blog. Jon, a co-worker of mine (and fellow blog reader) had set up a MovableType website and started blogging. He offered me a free blog on his site. Free being a very good price (this was long before the “free” blogging sites were worth using), I leaped at the opportunity. Jon called his blog Blogulaciousness, and I named mine as a joking reference to his. He gave up on blogging after a while, but I didn’t want to change the name of the blog, so I’ve stuck with a name that is purely an inside joke.

I did a round-up of the first year of blog posts here. Rather than repost that, I’ll do a round-up of the second year of blog posts. I have no particular criteria for which posts I think are worth remembering, so expect the grab bag that this collection certainly is:

January 2005

• Website registration follies — 2005-01-01
• Tales of Canadian retail — 2005-01-03
• Woodworking as a hobby — 2005-01-03
• Liberal mindset — 2005-01-18
• Search engines — 2005-01-19
• Bosworth Field — 2005-01-22
• Child safety — 2005-01-24
• Wine tasting — 2005-01-25

February 2005

• Packrat or public nuisance? — 2005-02-03
• Hillier scraps blueprint — 2005-02-07
• There ought to be a law — 2005-02-07
• Fisking Rifkin — 2005-02-08
• Vikings sold, pending league approval — 2005-02-16
• Visiting the Grange winery — 2005-02-21
• Moss to the Raiders — 2005-02-23
• Equal Pay? — 2005-02-28

March 2005

• The curse of Docco (a tribute, of sorts, to the late Hunter S. Thompson) — 2005-03-01
• The military MBA — 2005-03-04
• Back from New Orleans — 2005-03-20
• Trip report, part one — 2005-03-22
• Trip report, part two — 2005-03-26
• Serpent Mounds — 2005-03-28
• Trip report, part three — 2005-03-31

April 2005

• Yesterday’s trivia — 2005-04-10
• Canada’s Militia — 2005-04-11
• Helicopter woes — 2005-04-12
• Meetings, bloody meetings (with cameo appearance by occasional commenter Chris Greaves) — 2005-04-13
• Contrarian views — 2005-04-14
• Regulation and the economy — 2005-04-15
• Fear and Loathing in TechWriterWorld — 2005-04-18
• 2005 NFL Draft preview — 2005-04-21 (follow-up post here for one of the worst draft classes in Minnesota team history).
• “Checkers” for the 21st Century (can’t believe I left that mistake in the headline) — 2005-04-22

May 2005

• Computer meltdown — 2005-05-01
• So much to investigate, so little time — 2005-05-03
• Blogfight! Blogfight! (where we bid an unexpected farewell to Blogulaciousness) — 2005-05-03
• Monster truck action on suburban street! — 2005-05-05
• The sad state of Canada’s armed forces — 2005-05-06
• Fencing . . . and not with swords — 2005-05-08
• Fighting historical revisionism — 2005-05-13
• This could be the first blog to get an ASBO against it — 2005-05-19
• Another collossal waste of time, incoming — 2005-05-
• Trying to encourage people to save more — 2005-05-24
• Converting semi-auto to full-auto — 2005-05-27

June 2005

• Tag! It’s my turn — 2005-06-06
• Boring, geeky army stuff — 2005-06-09
• Poverty in Ontario — 2005-06-10
• A wet day for soccer — 2005-06-14
• Not the same as it ever was — 2005-06-16
• The identity theft epidemic — 2005-06-20
• Not fitting anywhere on the left-right spectrum — 2005-06-22
• Steve H. expounds on Nerdness. Nerditude? Nerdulaciousness? — 2005-06-26
• Scotland bans the claymore . . . again — 2005-06-29

July 2005

• SGML tagging is bad for your mental health — 2005-07-06
• Knopfler in Toronto — 2005-07-06
• A message from an alternate reality — 2005-07-08
• Sales taxes and basic arithmetic — 2005-07-09
• Next right abrogated: freedom from unreasonable search and seizure — 2005-07-22
• More on the Diane Schroer case — 2005-07-26

August 2005

• Offensensitivity again — 2005-08-05
• The Ghost of a Conscience — 2005-08-05
• Pushing back the encroachment of the state — 2005-08-12
• Steve Stirling interview — 2005-08-12
• This is not the way to fight terrorism — 2005-08-13
• Stormblogging — 2005-08-19
• Advance preview of the next health act — 2005-08-25
• News coverage of the aftermath of Katrina — 2005-08-31

September 2005

• Jane Galt Praises Price Gougers — 2005-09-01
• The name game, wine version — 2005-09-16
• Your linear art offends my religious sensibilities! — 2005-09-19
• The next NASA funding boondoggle — 2005-09-20
• Tom Wark on amateur wine reviews — 2005-09-22
• Synchronicity — 2005-09-28
• Vindicated! — 2005-09-30

October 2005

• Serenity — 2005-10-04
• Work Psychosis . . . a micro case study — 2005-10-12
• Courtesy in blogdom — 2005-10-13
• Is Amtrak headed for the junkyard? — 2005-10-18
• Municipal taxes in Ontario — 2005-10-19
• Red Ensign Standard, Mark XXX — 2005-10-24
• Royal Navy ship names — 2005-10-27

November 2005

• Photoblogging Algonquin Park — 2005-11-05
• Offensensitivity, Registry Office style — 2005-11-10
• When “help” is actually “extended harm” — 2005-11-11
• Pre-woodworking exercise — 2005-11-13
• Lee Valley Customer Service, in praise of — 2005-11-17
• No wonder GM is in trouble — 2005-11-24
• Wine Tour 0: Jon attempts to liveblog my wine tour — 2005-11-30

December 2005

• Preserving the past — 2005-12-06
• “Your papers, please.” — 2005-12-08
• Red Ensign Standard 33 — 2005-12-12
• Why Paul Martin is sounding desperate — 2005-12-19
• Gag laws and the freedom of speech — 2005-12-23

I’m still one of the laziest bloggers on the planet, but I’m still blogging after late middle-age in blog-years (most blogs start up with a few quick posts, then fade out with less and less frequent “sorry for not updating recently” posts).

Thanks again to Jon, both for getting me started in blogging, and for continuing to host my archives from the first five years.

Whatever the bug was, it pretty much wiped me out for the last 36-48 hours. While I wasn’t actually running (much of) a fever, I was getting all the joys of fever dreams interrupting what sleep I could get. I’d manage to fall asleep, then whatever dream I was having would segue into a weird kind of video game (think something like Tetris or Bejewelled) with the same song clip playing over and over again (“Imelda” by Mark Knopfler). I’d wake up, overheated and sweaty, throw off the covers, chill down again, cover up and go back to sleep. Repeat and repeat and repeat.

Physically, it wasn’t too bad (except for the express train running through my intestines), but my brain was running on far too little sleep. Hopefully it’s pretty much over.

I had planned on resuming normal blogging today, after the holidays, but I’m fighting off some kind of stomach bug at the moment, so blogging will have to wait until later.

I don’t usually have to deal with too much in the way of spam comments, as the Akismet plug-in seems to catch the majority of them for me. The last 24 hours has seen a lot of almost-believable comments that might have been approved, except they are copies of half-a-dozen originals, from similar IP addresses:

“Just wanted to let you know the sidebar looks off in my browser with 1600×1200 resolution.”

“Hey, I haven’t checked in here for a while, but I will put you on my bloglist so I don’t forget to check back.”

“I don’t always agree with your posts, but this was dead on, way to go!”

“Oooh, you’re such an inspiration. I love this blog!”

“Hmm. I am not so sure about that…”

Also amusing is that the posts are recorded as coming from places like “cat.com”, “dog.com”, “strawberry.com”, and “chocolate.com”. I’m assuming they’re all from the same botnet (most are from the 173.234.x.x block and report emails at ymail.com).