Changes

Time to start posting our adventures again, but first some housekeeping and updates.

Long ago, our first home Internet connection (not counting Compuserv) was a dial-up with a shell account at Illuminati Online, which had started, before the public Internet, as a dial-up bulletin board for Steve Jackson Games in Austin.  SJG had been famously busted and equipment confiscated by the Secret Service, and was part of the inspiration for the first local chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  It gave us a wonderfully short email address, degh@io.com, and I built a family website which eventually expanded to include hundreds of pages of family trees for both of our lines.

Alas, IO was sold to Prismnet years ago, but io.com remained, until this month.  In June, we were informed that the io.com domain was going away July 1; it had apparently only been on loan.  Now, we have had a DSL account, in Austin and then here, for at least 5 years, so a dial-up account to an Austin phone number was a bit silly, especially since our only land-line is a Skype account with a local number (so that local people don’t have to call our cell-phones long-distance – they are still Texas numbers for complicated reasons having to do with a family plan for people living in three states – the calls forward to our mobiles if we don’t answer at the house.)

Where was I? Oh yes, despite the redundancy of the account, I was attached to IO, and moving the website seemed like work.  But with the loss of the domain, I gritted my teeth and moved it to the website that came with our Frontier account (which had been Verizon when we got it, which complicated things no end.)  So, the site has moved to http://myplace.frontier.com/~degh, and I had fun learning to build a site map to give to Google so it would be indexed right away.  I still need to dig out my old Perl scripts and update the family trees – we’ve done a good bit more research since I generated them years ago.

In other developments, an on-line friend shared a Google+ invite with me, and Robert and I are now set up.  So far it seems to suit me better than Facebook, where I don’t post or look much anyway, beyond linking this blog to it.  I will be using G+ rather than Facebook for any sudden urges to share things with the world (or smaller circles, since an attraction of G+ is that I can limit who gets something – I’m sure many people are not interested in every single thing I have to say).  I think I have managed to set it up so that my blog posts appear there, and my public G+ comments will appear  in the sidebar here. (I hope it doesn’t go into an infinite loop.)

And while I was doing all that, I mistakenly updated my Thunderbird mail reader, even though a key add-on, Thunderbrowse, wasn’t updated yet.  Things are a bit broken, but I managed to set things up so that G+ appears in a tab, I can check out links that appear in mail and news, I cleaned up my RSS feeds, which is how I read news and the blogs I follow, and finally figured out how to easily share posts I’m reading there in Google Reader (which then appear in the sidebar here, and I think will appear in G+ – I haven’t seen anything the last couple days I think is worth sharing.)

So, my virtual life is reorganized.  We’ve been reorganizing the yard and garden, too, but that’s another post.