On _issing Dat_
My great hope of resurrecting some of my better posts from the old self-hosted clevermonkey.org may be fully dashed.
I cannot, for the life of me, find the backup of the MySQL database that powered that site, lo, those many years ago. I have a terrible feeling that I reused the drive to save @Carmen’s old Mac image when she got the new Air. (Which also means I may have purged the old ecogrrl.org site. Shhh. Don’t tell her.)
I have one even older drive to check, which requires the usual hoop-jumping because it is either Firewire (what now?) or PATA. But I’m thinking those bits are lost to the ages. My own personal Library of Alexandria, and I’m Caesar.
This mirrors a lot of how I seem to treat the information I’ve generated over the decades. In the past, I have deliberately purged notebooks full of writings in an effort to shed baggage and move on. But the old blog was different; it was always intended to be public. Personal, but very much intended for everyone to read (for better or for worse).
This is an unfortunately loss, if it is a loss. Perhaps I can salvage some of that from the Internet WayBack Machine? Honestly, I suspect only about 1% of the dataset I’m thinking of wants to be saved. It’s not like the world is missing another Socrates’ Rhetorics here.