Blogging Dilemma

Originally Posted:
Monday, July 28, 2008
12:18:00 AM CDT
Feeling Grumpy


I've been in a bit of a funk today. Since Monday I've been dealing with bouts of vertigo which is past the point of being trippy and has reached being fully annoying, and for the past four days I've had a headache that I can't shake. I can only assume that it's sinus/allergy related since I've been sneezing my head off, my eyes are red and burning and my right ear is in pain. It finally rained in Seattle today. Yay! Chalk another one up for me. It's no fun being a walking barometer. I don't get paid for my misery and, at most, the only benefit is that I can predict when I actually need to carry an umbrella versus when the weather man says to. If this was Salem and it was during the time of witch trials, I'd be burning on the stake right now.

Anyway...about my dilemma...I read a news article about how AOL is going to be discontinuing some of its services by the end of the year. One of them, You've Got Pictures (or AOL Pictures as it's also known), is slated for the chopping block. Why? Because the options for advertising are too limited and AOL says that there are other services such as Google's Picasa and Flickr that are more popular. Okay. But, you see, what about ME? I've got tons of pictures stored on AOL Pictures, which, I wouldn't be so upset about if these were not my only copies and if I didn't spend countless hours typing captions on them. My external hard drive stopped working in January and rather than pay $1,700 for data recovery, I've been holding out waiting until I absolutely HAVE to fork over the bucks to save what can be saved. The big flaw in that plan happens to be that many of the only copies I have of my pictures and all of my itunes are on the dead drive. So, I've not been able to update my iPod and, up until now, I've been okay with not having access to my pictures because I knew that I've got copies online too, but the quality will not be the same.

Which leads me to...aside from the obvious, holy crap- what's going to happen to my pictures thought, it also hit me that AOL will most likely be doing away with its blog service too. Now I'm really ticked. I've got two years worth of ramblings posted here. Sure, it's not like I'm Einstein and these are the entries of a genius who is posting about some world altering theories of physics, but still. I guess I'm going to have to find another blog home. Which, ironically, shopping for a BlogSpot is very similar to looking a real estate. You have to look at the neighborhood, see what features the place has, see if it's going to hold its value, and so on. Who knew a blog was such a commitment?