Welcome back!  To me ...

I've been blogging since Jan 1, 2003, and during that time there have been years when I posted hundreds of items, nearly every day, and years when I posted only a handful of items; even years when I posted just one item, my "never forget" posts on 9/11.  Please see the archive for the whole story.

2020 was a weird year in many ways but it became a blogging year, after a light 2017 and one-post-only 2018 and 2019.  But 2021 was a no-blogs-at-all year, my first, not even a "never forget" post (I didn't forget 9/11, but I was in Italy at the time [story for another day] and forgot to blog about not forgetting),  And so far 2022 has been a no-blogs year too.  Anyway.

One of the joys of blogging after having done so for a number of years is seeing what I was blogging about in past years;my "flight" link is my favorite, a vertical slice of what was going on in my head this time each year.  Of course that requires that I blogged in a prior year, so my ancient history is way better than more recent times.

This morning I did it again, clicked flight, saw no posts at all for many recent years, and resolved to start posting again.  It's easier to make such a resolution than to keep it so we'll see how I do, but at least if you are reading this it means the mechanism for doing so is still up and running - after nearly 20 years! - and I was able to wake it up.

I have a little store of "things to blog about", going back to, um, 2016!, and I'll see if I can dribble some of them out, and then also start posting about whatever.  Many thoughts this Holiday season for sure, a lot going on.

But I don't only blog for me, I blog for you too, and you have no idea what's been going on with me, for a loong time I guess, all the way back to 2016.  I can't tell you everything and I won't try, but I can hit the highlights with the perspective of time; some things seem amazing in the moment but fade into irrelevance, other things maybe didn't even pass notice in their time but are interesting in retrospect.

And blogs are still a thing!  Just now Twitter is all the news, with Elon Musk having bought them, and with significant revelations about how left-leaning filtering policies might have influenced the recent elections.  I've never tweeted much, although at times I've manually or automatically tweeted links to my blog posts as a sort of alternative RSS.  I have Facebooked, more at some times less at others; it is a cool place to stay in touch with friends, but it remains a walled garden; it's hard to "link to posts" on FB, an ongoing and key limitation.  I will might try to "echo back" cool stuff I posted about on FB during my recent-ish non-blogging periods, for completeness.

So! Stay tuned, let's see what I do.  There is a meta-Ole watching the real Ole, and meta-Ole is most interested in the real Ole's follow through on this :)  As always I welcome your feedback; I've never hosted comments and don't have plans to do now, but you are most welcome to email me and I'll definitely play back interesting thoughts you might share.  Onward!