Recently I have found myself thinking about why I started to blog. What did I hope to accomplish by writing in such a public way. My First blog was called Michael’s Thoughts. I started it to write about becoming a father. At least that’s what I think it was. You see I don’t have my original blog online anywhere anymore. I hosted it on a domain I no longer have. When I took it down I’m sure I backed it up, but over the last few weeks I have been looking for the files and I can’t find them.
I have gone through a couple of computers and a few different hard drives since I took my old blog down. And while I have found the sites supporting files, I can’t seem to find a backup of the data file. I know there was one, I remember thinking about setting up a site to see my old posts. Even looked at the SQL files, but I never took the time and now the files are lost. They don’t seem to be in the multiple directories of backups I have on my desktop, or my server. Are the stuck on one of the Hard drives I have attached to my spotty external drive enclosure? or in the stack of hard drives I’ve got stuck on a shelf in the store room.
Or have I just not looked hard enough, it’s so easy to get distracted while going through old files. Last night is a perfect example. While looking for the backup I found my T directory. It contains all my old Turing programs. I tried to run one of the compiled apps, windows promptly informed me that application didn’t run in this version of windows.
I must admit, I was a little bit surprised to see that. I know I had run them in Windows 7 before, or at least vista, because I had written a series of posts about My Life as a programmer on my old blog, and I had included screen shots of my Turing programs. So confronted with this I should have moved to the next directory to continue looking for my data-file Of course that isn’t what I did. What I did search the internet to see if there was a way to run the Turing programs. And there is I found Open Turning, a compiler that works. So I began playing around with it some, seeing what my old programmed looked like.
I was lost in the rabbit hole for longer then I are to admit. When I got back to searching for my old blog posts I came at it from a different way. Looking at my old programs got me interested in a series I had written about how I started to program, so instead of looking for the backup, I started looking through the WayBack Machine on Archive.org trying to find my Life as a programmer posts. I managed to retrieve most of them, and a few other posts, but not everything. So I’m left wondering where to go from here. I can find some of the my old posts on the way back machine, and I might be able to find more if I go through the old hard drives and hunt. The question is is it worth it? What should I do with them. Should I try and recreate my life as a programer series from what I got off of the WayBack Machine? Should I continue looking through old drives ( I have one sitting on my shelf, that I think might have the files, but I haven’t hooked it up yet for technical reasons.)?
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