I, (state your name), do solemnly swear...

(Note: This post was originally published on Monday, May 17 2004 on Another Monkey. The problems referred to the then-current versions of Blogger, Internet Explorer, and Norton SystemWorks. The problem was primarily heat-related, and would continue to exist until just a few weeks ago, when a friend built and gave me a new computer. Blogger would introduce a "Recover Post" feature, which was itself pretty buggy, and then introduced an autosave function a few months ago. The Norton SystemWorks install would prove to be...problematic.)

...to always save my posts as I go along. Starting now.

I was working on a post that was as long and rambling as a label on a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap. It was actually a combination of three ideas: a post about the influence that British TV and radio had on me as a pre-adolescent, a post about the cacophony of events in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s that helped to lay the groundwork for the person I have become, and a post about the sheer number of cranks and crackpots out there who have put a lot of effort into creating very elaborate websites, and have muddied the pool of knowledge and information on the Internet (and made researching the previous two proto-posts virtually impossible) by dumping in random data sewage by the tanker load.

I was working on this, when my Internet Explorer crapped out. Twice. After the first time, I started this post. It crapped out the second time just before I could hit the “Save Draft” button. So now I’m writing this in Word. I hope I can bring it over without too much fuss.

Maybe the universe is trying to tell me I shouldn’t be doing this right now, and instead I should be compiling songs from a stack of CDs into a mix disc to play between bands at a friend's wedding, which is coming up in three weeks. Yes, that seems reasonable. That, or maybe I should finally hunker down and install my new copy of Norton SystemWorks now. Eh, I’ll go for the CD. Less like work!