Where The Hell Is Paul?

I've been getting queries from old readers wondering if I am okay, since my last posting was in February.

Well, it's been a few months since I last posted here! It's not that I've been sick or dead, it's just that our computer crashed, hard, last February. And, since this blog uses my own proprietary software, and I never bothered to program into it any alternate means of posting entries (for example, by smartphone), I haven't really had any options until the computer was replaced.

When I say the computer crashed hard, I mean that both hard drives failed within days of each other. I had a lot backed up, but not more recent stuff. And my music collection wasn't backed up at all, because it would have required some 200 DVDs for the job.

Since I cannot find work that will accommodate my leg, damaged by my bout with necrotizing fasciitis, I couldn't afford a replacement. I finally got a new computer about two months ago. But I still couldn't post here, because I did not have a disk copy of FrontPage 2003, which I bought years ago but with all the moves and so on, has been lost, as were most of the photos I took in 2010. (Fortunately, I had uploaded them to Facebook, but those copies have a lower resolution.)

So I spent my days while Jason was at work, re-ripping our old CDs to get them back on the computer. Ripping, normalizing, tagging, and trimming all take time. The fun part is re-listening to old, beloved music. But it still takes time, and isn't as creative as writing blog posts.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I contacted a friend who had a FrontPage 2003 disk she was willing to loan me. I still had my old activation code, so I used that and, voila! I had FrontPage back.

Or did I? The new computer comes with Windows 7 Home Premium. (The old computer ran Windows Vista.) So, to my surprise, I was unable to connect FrontPage to the Internet. I have no problem browsing; but it turns out that Microsoft has decided to withhold "Internet Folders" (WEBDAV) for it's Windows 7 Home line. I will have to spend $80 more to "upgrade" to something the previous version had for free. In the meantime, though, I can do a little blogging by composing on FrontPage, then using an external FTP (file transfer protocol) application to actually put the posts on my host so you can read it.

So, the bottom line is, I'm fine and thanks for wondering.

Grandson Zach, and myself, just to prove I'm okay!