Claude Montpetit -- Montpetit.net -- en

I lost the machine that was hosting my weblog. This machine was kindly installed at Macadamian (thanks for the connection!) I was managing it from my home. I believe that the power supply exploded.

Anyway, managing a server is a lot of work. Even for a simple site like this one, it requires managing the web server software (I was using Tomcat's development web server which may not have supported being slashdotted, should I have written something of real geeky interest), a FTP server, a remote access software (VNC). Then you eventually need what I did not have: searching capabilities, comments support, a database server, daily backups, and ... hardware failure recovery.

And all of this keeps you busy doing stuff that is not necessarily bringing you forward in your current development.

So I switched to a web hosting company that does most of all this stuff. I was surprise when I realized how low prices had come down to. I get all the basic software installed and configured, with a nice web-based control panel to manage settings for Apache, a Tomcat web app, FTP accounts, Email accounts, DBs, Web and FTP statistics, shell access, perl, python, and much more. The hosted initial setup was painless, and it took me a couple of ours to install Movable Type on top of this.

I am now up and running after the couple of days required for the nameserver IP changes to propagate.

Next step: Import all my weblog posts from my blogger account, try to figure out how I am going to handle translated posts in Moveable Type, and create a more personal layout.

Excerpt:

2 films à voir qui traitent de la bulle (éclatée) de l'internet: The center of the world et Startup.com. 2 films qui montrent une face sombre de cette période glorieuse. Le premier montre un informaticien de Silicon Valley déconnecté de... more

Somewhere in mid-seventies, when I was around 13 years old, I got hooked on CBs (I may have been even younger because my voice's pitch was still high and other CB users were thinking I was a girl.) I used my saving money to buy a CB radio, an antenna (that I installed myself on the roof around the chimney), a huge power microphone (because of which I received a warning from Canadian's broacast police that suspected me to use a booster - gee did I get scared!).

My base name was ZEBRA, my calling letters were something like XM52-42377 (not sure about the "42" though). I had my own card (these cards had a special name - Q-Card?). I bugged my father once in a while to travel a little bit to attend conventions on weekends where I was exchanging cards with others. Eventually, he even installed a mobile station in his Camaro Z-28 so he could talk to me.

I was playing drums at this time, so I had a band. The 3 of us were CB users so we called ourselves the CBoys and we produced our groupie t-shirts with this name (our most famous interpretation was some parts from Suite Madame Blue - Styx, and Roy Buchanan's
The Messiah will come again.)

Ok, so I admitted it publicly: I was a CB geek. I just revealed all of this to Chantal and I can still hear her laugh upstairs.

Now, around 25 years later, I realize I am still a geek.
MSNBC describes the similarity between communication movements, CBs and WebLogs.

In the CB days, there was a small group of very popular CByers. These individuals were using a lot of air time and acting as some kind of leaders on public channels. The rest of us generally listenned. Sounds very much like the weblog world to me. And I am still in the same bunch.

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