"Hello, boys..."

"...I'm baaaack!"

Seriously, though, how have you been? What's new? Why has it been so busy here since I've been away? 

Define busy, you say?

Up until my hiatus began, the record for monthly hits was 6,846, set in December of 2016, with the median over time running around 3K.  Since I went on hiatus, I've beaten that record three times - 8,794 in May of 2023, 8,188 as of this date in March of 2024, and in February 2024 (a Leap Year month, yes, but still a short month) it shot up to a ridiculous 12,598 hits, almost double the pre-hiatus peak.

How do I know this?  Well, full disclosure, I've remained a regular visitor to the blog. It's a useful journal that records 16 years of my life, and as such if I want to show someone a picture of a giant robot in Japan, my wife as Yoda, or a post-apocalyptic statue of Donald Trump half-buried in the sand, this is where I go to find those things.  

I also continued to receive the occasional comment,* although not as many as you'd expect, even from a month with nearly 13,000 hits - which, frankly, leads me to suspect that a lot of those hits were from Russian spambots.  But then, I've always thought my readership was mostly Russian spambots, which didn't bother me - they didn't leave a trail of comments containing objectionable links, so I didn't care.  This blog has always been a labour of love rather than a mechanism for fame, so total visitors was more an area of mild interest instead of a goal.

And that's the reason I've decided to start blogging again. I've missed having a journal of my life as a geek, to the point where I've continued to log ideas for postings and take pictures as if I were going to post them.  Rather than let them go to waste, over the next few months I'll be adding those missing posts from the past year and a half - based  on my notes, it's been a target-rich environment in terms of topics! 

This post and The Lost Posts: a guide to post-hiatus posting will act as bookends for those posts - that posting introduces the idea of The Lost Posts and explains the timeline.

And here we go again...

- Sid

* The most surprising thing about my career as a blogger is that over the course of 16 years and close to 400,000 hits, I only received one comment that I felt was intended to be provocative - literally, in the sense of trying to provoke an argument.