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Blog loss

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Suddenly the server for WordPress has lost all its blogs since August 17. COINCIDENTALLY the last blog entry I have left is the one written on my last day in Portugal. It raised the existential question with which I started this blog: Should I do this? Who would be served by it? Does it serve me? Certainly in Portugal, it served me, by linking me to my community of friends. Some people reported loving the Portuguese travel story and pilgrimage. But when I returned from Portugal, I waffled, started, stopped, was uncertain of my intention, and then that disappeared mysteriously.

Here’s how the WordPress man-in-the-machine explained it:

“Why are the Blog entries back to August?
Maybe you noticed that your blog is missing posts dating back to August 17th? Or that your blog ain’t here anymore. Well, after doing this for 3+ years we have had a series of server errors and the database that was storing all the blog entries was wiped clean. The most recent back-up that we’ve been able to restore is from August 17th. All our daily back-ups between August 17th and now are missing for the moment.

We are still working on finding a more recent back-up. If we do not find it, I am not sure if there is anything we can do. We are truly sorry about this.

Posted by Sean at September 21, 2006 06:27 PM”

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | No Comments »

To blog or not to blog?

Sunday, June 11th, 2006

As I prepare to leave for my pilgrimage in Portugal and Galicia, a couple of people have asked if I’m going to start a travel blog. I have mixed feelings about blogs. When they first crept into my awareness, I found blogs exhibitionistic. Why, I thought, would people put the intimate details of their lives on the internet for any stranger to peer at. What’s that urge about? And then who reads blogs? I’m still trying to integrate my experience of living in Lesotho, where most people have no electricity and are nursing family members with AIDS by candle light, with living in Sugar Land, Texas, where most people live in mansions and still support Tom Delay: “He’s done so much for our community.” So I think about access, about the cyber-gap, about who lives in the global village, who cuts the grass for whom. About 166,000 people are in prison in Texas. I visited Guillermo today. He’s been incarcerated since 1992. He’s working on his three-minute speech for the graduation ceremony at the end of the Gang Renunciation program he’s in. He asked me whether I thought it better to quote Sun Tzu or Gandhi. He reads. The first book he asked me for, back when he was still in solitary, was Thucydides. He has never used a cell phone, a computer, or an ipod. Portable CD players were the hot new thing when he got locked up. His mom died this past March. He’s working on his soul. He said the change has come gradually, “Not like no lightbulb moment. More like a very slow sunrise, like a ten-year sunrise.” He says he used to want to find the people who pressed charges against him and beat the shit out of them. Now he wants to find them to make amends. He said, “I hurt them, and they didn’t have nothing to do with the pain I was in. I feel so bad about that.” I told him I’m going to light candles for him in chapels, churches, and cathedrals all over Portugal, and his eyes filled with tears. He’s never sent or received an email. Guys like him don’t read blogs. So I think about audience. [read on]

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, What does it mean? | 3 Comments »

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