Psychicfriends Cleanup: Phase 1

I'm gonna pad out the "forced march" posts with a running commentary of stuff I should've done a long time ago, with regards to not letting this ol' blog get so stale.

These posts, daily throughout March, should do their part to freshen the content, but the foundation is pretty rough. For example, here, let's look at the sidebar, upper right:

(screenshot included here, since, soon after we've discussed it, I hope to fix it, so this post in archive form will hopefully be surrounded by widgets and blurbs of the freshest quality)

First, the "about me" link. As it exists now, (and here linked to it's web-archive version), it includes topical info about my choice of home, computer workstations, job, pets, and life-partner.

Choice computer bits: "Apple Powerbook G4 667 Mhz", "200mhz pentium freebsd machine", "Dell Dimension running windows XP", and "Sun Ultra1 workstation." Ahh, youth. My iPhone's more horsepower than any of those today.

My career info isn't that stale, it just doesn't include my current job at Joyent, or my last 4 years at MLB for that matter. The bits about where I live are also woefully out of date, although technically they reflect what's on my driver's license... which itself is woefully out of date, and doesn't match the state on the VW's plates.

I do still love my wife Maggie, and the Yankees. That's not changed.

Moving further down that chunk of stale sidebar, we get to the links for "my current fotolog" which itself is kinda funny, since it's the old "fotolog.net" URL, when the site, and company, switched to fotolog.com before they got sold years ago. Fotolog was one of the creations of serial-entrepeneur and Nelson-wedding-groomsman Scott Heiferman along with Adam Seifer. I was a very early user of fotolog, but I kind of outgrew it's purpose, and was only updating it out of loyalty to friends. When they sold the company and moved on, I let that project rest.

Beneath that, there's a link to my Flickr page which I had before Maggie joined their staff. Flickr's a great site, and I've got a Pro membership there for years to come, so I'll be keeping that on the new sidebar.

Finally (for today), there's a counter I whipped up that used to update a counter of the messages that'd passed through and gotten caught by my SpamAssassin filters. I shut down a workstation years ago that was a cog in that process, and the counter's been frozen at 412587 ever since. It might have rolled over by now if I'd kept that running. Any more, I just forward a copy of most of my ryan.net mail to gmail for spamfiltering it there. I do still receive my mail through my mailserver, though. I can't let go of knowing what's arriving when, by watching the logs.

That's all for tonight. Now, I'm off to back this server up, before I start knocking out load-bearing GIFs.