No Mulligans
I had a marvelous little post all prepared for you this morning. But returning to it after various distractions and a routine reboot, I discovered the auto-save function of my interface is actually just a cruel joke from the geeks and code-jockeys who developed the latest version of blogcast. Little remained but fragments of the perfect post I was putting the finishing touches on, alas.
This sort of thing happens periodically, and it's always best to just drop it immediately and move on. It's tempting to try and recreate the various turns of phrase that seemed so perfectly delightful the first time around. But trying to recreate a post from memory is like that scene from Groundhog Day where Bill Murray has the "spontaneous" snowball fight with the kids for, like, the fourteen-hundredth time...
Nothing like canned inspiration to ruin the moment.
Sorry for your loss--and your readers'. But you've written a lot of great posts. You're one of few bloggers who regularly cause me to say "I wish I'd written that."
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Aw, thanks, James!
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How many gems of finely crafted paragraphs, each word weighed against its predecessor, have I lost by merely hitting the wrong key on a hyper sensitive keyboard that suddenly and mysteriously sends the browser, word processor or email client to its previous state erasing every letter from screen and memory (computer and human) leaving but the faint scent of prose sacrificed to the binary gods mediating content and media I can not count.
One would think that the lesson was learned the evening of an all-nighter when at 3:30 AM power blinks for a second empyting every word of a 5 page paper due at dawn the same day. But some lessons are never fully learned.
However, I have finally learned that if I am writing something that extends beyond a few paragraphs to use a full fledged word processor. Any other programs (email, blogger, etc.) generally do not have the features that are most needed such as a backup feature.
As I tell folks I work with backup as people used to vote: early and often.
Happy New Year to you Mike. Boston (and the web) are the better for you. Good luck with your new leadership role with the Victory Gardens.
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Thanks Dave!
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