I Feel So Old!!!!!

I'm really bad at celebrity spotting.

A couple of my co-workers came back from lunch all giddy because they think they may have seen Hugh Jackman.

OK. I know who he is.

Another co-worker was moved to reminisce about a Ryan Reynolds sighting she'd had sometime last year.

Er...Ryan who? OK, beginning to feel a little behind the times.

Well, I'm really bad at spotting celebrities, so in the spirit of conversation, I decided to share my ultimate "Just how bad AM I at spotting celebrities? This bad!" story.

There was a period of time in the early 00's when I was taking classes at a gym that had been all the rage among the stars in the 80's, still had a scattering of luminous clientele when I was attending, probably still does today. I ended up there because the guy I thought of as my kayak coach at the time had been an instructor there for years & was running winter classes for paddlers - it was tons of fun, he was a really good trainer. We had a really stupid falling-out a year or two down the road, never patched things up, but to this day I still have to give him credit for being the first person to really teach me how to do a good, balanced, non-boring, dry-land workout (before that I only really knew how to work out in the water).

For a couple of weeks, my class schedule was such that I was always in the locker room at the same time as this very nice, very attractive older African American lady. We got to the point where we'd chitchat a bit as we were getting ready for class - I can't really remember about what (except that she mentioned her daughter a couple of times, with a lot of affection) - well, finally one week she was talking about how she was getting ready for a show & it finally dawned on me that she was Eartha Kitt.

Eartha Kitt!!! I had failed to recognize Eartha Kitt!!!

So that (less the explanation of what I was even doing at a gym with famous people in the first place, which I just threw in here because hey, it actually makes the story kayak-relevant!!!) is the story that I occasionally tell to entertain people with my total inability to tell the famous from the unfamous.

So I spun my yarn, expecting the usual laughter -

And co-worker #4 looked at me & said "Who's Eartha Kitt?"

AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGHHH!

PS - A note about that lovely picture of Eartha: NO, I did NOT suddenly go all crazed fangirl on her & demand an autographed picture. I borrowed the picture above from a true autograph hound (speaking of cute! hee hee). I think part of why people like her went to this gym was because it was pretty small & pretty serious & they could attend & work out like normal people - we were all there to do the same thing, get fit, not gawk or be gawked at. When the light finally did dawn, I guess I did have a brief "OMG, you're..." impulse, but I quelled it, didn't think it would be very nice.

But I still think it's pretty amazing that I just didn't figure out who she was right off the bat, y'know?

MLK Day

Amen.
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I saw this at the top of Summit to Shore's blogroll, on Presbyterian Bloggers, and I just watched it & thought I would post it too.

I've read the text but I don't know if I've ever watched the whole speech, beginning to end. Gave me shivers. And beyond the speech itself, what an amazing gathering of courage & dignity there was on the Mall that day.

I don't know that I'd say our country has quite reached "the solid rock of brotherhood." But how much less progress would we have made along "the sunlit path of racial justice" without Dr. King & the people who were brave enough to follow him?

Thanks to all of them & especially Dr. King. Would he were still with us today.

Sails For Sustenance

Just in on the comments - here's an interesting not-for-profit that sends used sails to fishing villages in Haiti, Sails for Sustenance.

Shopping for a new suit of sails, and wondering what to do with your used sails? This seems like a good way to do some good with them.

I suspect that with the current crisis, cash donations to relief organizations like Doctors Without Borders would probably be more crucial, but this seems like a really nice idea for people of the sailor persuasion to keep in mind down the road - and this blog has been around long enough that it seems to do well in Google searches, so I'm posting this in hopes that down the road, people googling "Old sails", "Recycling old sails", "Getting rid of old sails", "Donating old sails" may stumble across this.

Thanks, Baydog!

(and here's a good video for a dreary day in January)

Reid Stowe & Schooner Anne, 1000 Days At Sea

Schooner Anne, Atlantic-bound, 4/21/2007

Originally posted a couple of days before the actual 1000th day. Reposting with minor edits on 1/16/2010, to coincide the actual date of the 1000th day at sea.

The pictures here are from Flickr gallery of the photos I took the day they left.

Reid Stowe, one of my dock neighbors back in the Pier 63 days, is coming up on his 1000th day at sea has been at sea for 1000 days, non-stop! Full details about the celebration are over on the 1000 Days website - this afternoon there was an event at the South Street Seaport Museum, and I expect that the party at the nearby pub is in full swing right now.

Congratulations to Reid, to Soanya (what a trouper that young lady turned out to be), and all the people from Pier 63 & beyond who worked together to make it happen. You guys must all be so proud!

Later note - There's a post over on H2uh0, gives a pretty good rundown of the entire trip to date.

One more moment of serious -

(click on the picture to go to Doctors Without Borders)

OR
Text “Haiti” to 90999 To Donate $10 To American Red Cross Efforts.

(Mahalo, Senor Caballo for solving yet another massive cripes-I-hate-to-just-ignore-this-but-I-have-nothing-worth-saying moment)

We Now Return To Our Regular Frivolous Programming

Hey! Look! Visible Light! At 5 P.M.! HURRAY!

More Controversy!!!!!!!

Holy (sea) cow, it's, like, totally, Controversy Week here at the normally mild-mannered Frogma blog!

THIS IS SO CRAZY!!!!!!!

Thank you, Adam!

Another interesting link re Paul Watson/Sea Shepherd -

Here's something really interesting about Paul Watson, the man behind Sea Shepherd & the Ady Gil - Greenpeace's take.

Irony and the Ady Gil

You heard about this, right? The collision between the Ady Gil, that ultraspiffy, futuristic, carbon-neutral Batboat-thing that the Sea Shepherd organization is (oops, was) using as part of their campaign to harass whalers in Antarctica, and the Shōnan Maru 2, part of the Japanese whaling fleet? Been a lot of talk about it on the internet. I've watched the various videos & personally, I've got no idea who was actually at fault in the collision (I think COLREGS say that when 2 boats collide, both skippers are at fault, but I also think that's assuming that no skipper would ever actually want to hit another boat, which in the case of these Sea Shepherd folks is clearly not always the case - I'm not saying that that's what happened this time, just that historically - well, keep reading).

If I had to put money on what happened, I think I'd go with a scenario close to the one Commenter #3, Andy (not Sebago clubmate Andy, another Andy) lays out over on the Old Salt Blog. As long as betting is optional, though, I think I will just keep my money in my pocket.

Still - I will just toss out one observation that I've left on a couple of blogs -

I think it’s ironic that Sea Shepherd’s screaming about the sinking of the Ady Gil, while simultaneously selling t-shirts featuring a list of those boats that they themselves claim to have rammed or sunk.

The Shortest Trip Report I Will Ever Write!

Go fish,
No fish!

OK, OK, I can't just leave it at that. This was my first fishing trip since I was in high school & although the herring weren't around today, I found that I do still enjoy it very much. Possibly more than I did when I was a kid - maybe I'm better at waiting now. It was cold, but I was properly bundled up (as you can see) & had my usual thermos of hot cider, it was a gorgeous day & it was just kind of nice hanging out watching the water going by.

Andy gave me a ride & our first stop was at Stella Maris, a fishing shop in Sheepshead Bay. They had a nice inexpensive light rod & reel kit, so now I have a new toy that I think I will probably play with again.

I think it helped that I'd been watching "Lotek's" reports over the week, so my expectations weren't too high! Andy definitely plans to keep watching the reports & if & when we start getting schools in Jamaica Bay (apparently these are an all or nothing kind of fish - when they turn up, it's in droves - if they haven't, you could fish all day & not get a nibble), he said he'll organize another trip.

My January weekends already seem to be getting busy - but if it happens when I'm around, I'll definitely join that!

Thanks, Andy!

Callaloo!

www.trinigourmet.com

Timbuktu!

Loup-Garou!

Babalu!

Lovable Shmoo!



Kathmandu!

How do you do?

Peekaboo!

Yodelay hee hoo!



Here's a Hullabaloo, And Now I'm Through!

....O
:D/>
.O

(OK, that's it, I'm finally adding a tag for Just Plain Silly!)

Callooh, Callay!

And on top of everything else, I think I'm bundling up & going fishing tomorrow! YAY!

(hm, although it doesn't look like the herring are jumping just quite yet. Still game to give it a try, though.

Oh Frabjous Day!

Reasons I'm very happy, in no particular order:

My camera revived, just before I was going to pack it up & send it back to B&H for replacement.

I got a very nice apology from the CEO of Echo about the business with their customer support staff. I genuinely appreciated it.

I got my replacement replacement drysuit from Kokatat.

I've worked things out that I get to go on another sealwatching trip AND work in a visit with TQ in January (I was afraid it was going to be one or the other).

I got an email from TQ, he got a full-time job! He's living in an area with very high unemployment & work's been hard to come by. He's been making ends meet with a couple of different part-time jobs but it's been a long & occasionally lean year for him, so I'm thrilled he's got a solid 40 hours a week now.

And my boss gave me permission to take time off this summer to attend my 25th h.s. reunion.

In Hawaii!

I'M GOING HOME!
I'M GOING HOME!
I'M GOING HOME!

I'm just a trifle excited about this, can you tell?

....O
:D/>
.O

LORAN-C

Just in today from the USCG:

SPECIAL NOTICE
UBJ: TERMINATION OF ALL U.S. LORAN-C SIGNALS

1. IAW THE 2010 DHS APPROPRIATIONS ACT, THE U.S. COAST GUARD WILL TERMINATE THE TRANSMISSION OF ALL U.S. LORAN-C SIGNALS EFFECTIVE 2000Z 08 FEB 2010. AT THAT TIME, THE U.S. LORAN-C SIGNAL WILL BE UNUSABLE AND PERMANENTLY DISCONTINUED. THIS TERMINATION DOES NOT AFFECT U.S. PARTICIPATION IN THE RUSSIAN-AMERICAN OR CANADIAN LORAN-C CHAINS. U.S. PARTICIPATION IN THESE CHAINS WILL CONTINUE TEMPORARILY IN ACCORDANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

There's an interesting page giving a good bit more information at the
USCG NavCen.

Interesting idea re comments -

6:30 pm update - Guess what, I just got the nicest email apology from Echo's CEO.

I'm suddenly feeling a lot less ruffled & a lot more inclined to just leave things as they are for a while, see if some of the glitchy stuff in Echo gets smoothed out & the system gets easier to use (especially signing in & allowing links to websites).

If it does, I'd be inclined to give it another go.



Hm. I just clicked one of the links on my spiffy updated blogroll & found myself looking at an interesting possible solution to this loss-of-comments issue. Alan at Some Amusing Blog Pun, who was also using Haloscan, gave me the idea.

It's simple. I could just start a new blog. Same as the old one. Last post on the old one links to the new one & explains. Sidebar on the new one include a one-item blogroll linking to Frogma - The First Five Years. I keep my JS-Kit account & re-install the widget that keeps the old comments alive here on v.1, while the new blog moves on with Blogger comments.

I'm slightly reluctant to do it because I do like having the blog all here on one blog (it already bugs the heck out of me that my photos are on 3 different sites - does that make me anal-retentive?). And I actually remember the comments that I really liked pretty well, and once I became resigned to the fact that they'd killed Haloscan "make-die-dead" (Hawaiian pidgin for really, really dead) & really was no magic way for them to get those comments into Blogger, I was pretty much ready to drop it & move on. Although cripes, I did get another nastygram from Customer Supportress this morning, devoid of useful information & as far as I could tell serving the sole purpose of getting the last word in. Can you tell that at this point I'm honestly more annoyed at how rudely I've been treated than I am about the comments?

Oh, yes, the comments! That's what this was about. Not whining. Sorry!

So there it is - this idea of preserving the old comments by starting Frogma Volume 2 (The Next Five Years?), and I'm really on the fence, and...

Well, what do you guys think? I'd really like to hear!

Does anybody ever even look at the older comments? Would it be worth the discontinuity of a 2-part blog to preserve them? Or are comments a thing of the moment, fleetingly fun, then left behind?

On the plus side for leaving things as is, when things got really good in comments, I have had a tendency to want to highlight the fun in a subsequent post, so those are still there either way. And in fact, it is pretty easy to turn JS-Kit on & off on Blogger - I'm thinking that it may be worth a few bucks' ransom a year just to keep 'em alive over there, instead of downloaded into what would basically be a deep archive (once I put the xml thing on my external hard drive, dollars to donuts I never look at it again) and over time, I could append some of the livelier comment streams to the posts that inspired them.

Yup. Definitely coming up with more options now that I've given up on getting any satisfaction from the folks at JS-Kit (ok, an apology would actually be nice, but beyond that, whatevahs).

And Alan, thanks again for getting me to think beyond the obvious options.

Who's Tough?

Who's tough?

Brooklyn herring fishermen, that's who!

But so kind too - that sweet, sweet man, rescuing a poor chilly chicken & taking it someplace warm...

muahahahahaaaa!

Me, I didn't leave my apartment on Sunday. It just sounded too cold outside, the rattling branches & the moaning winds. There were errands I could have run. I didn't.

Let's see, who else is tough? Oh, Marcus and Biff are tough. Looks like good progress so far. Hope they continue to do well once they turn the corner to the more open coast.

Oh, and O-Docker & his happy waving spouse are tough, too. Such fiendishly brutal conditions! How do they stand it?

BTW, The herring fishing link that sort of got me going on the "Who's tough?" line (I always admire the fisherfolk as being others who stay out there when conditions are less than smiling blue summer-sky calm) was sent by "AndyTechie", a clubmate at Sebago & one of the other members of the Sebago blog. He's a fisherman himself & is doing his best to get some other clubmates "hooked" ha ha - at the Frostbite Regatta, he told us a little bit about herring fishing when the herring are running, and weather, fish & time frames permitting, he's going to organize a kayakless club outing to Canarsie Pier & show people how!

Scheduling allowing, I really hope to join in on that fun. He said even people who never fished before in their life would like it. Well, I haven't been fishing since I was a kid, but I loved it then & I don't see why I wouldn't still like it now.

Brief return to JS-Kit comment thing - and A Tale of Two Help Desks.

JS-Kit support staff has evidently returned from vacation, so I have turned their system back on in hopes that they can do whatever it is they need to do so that will allow me to turn their system off without losing five years of comments.

Somebody referred to my "optimism" recently! :D



Afternoon update - or - It was the best of help desks, it was the worst of help desks.

Funny thing is, I got to deal with both on the same day!
******************************

The Worst of Help Desks:

I'm turning the Echo comment system back off & returning to Blogger's. That silly idea I had that somehow they could transfer the old Haloscan stuff into Blogger? The customer "support" rep straightened me out (and about as gently as Cesar straightens out a really obstreporous dog, too). Customer support? More like customer suppress. I guess I shouldn't be too upset, Haloscan was available as a free service and I never gave them any money, but it is a bit of a bummer to basically lose almost 5 years worth of comments (there's a way to export so I can store them on my hard drive at home, but you can't import them to Blogger - there are a few ways to import the file to other comment systems but from what I've read, they take a good bit more technical know-how & time than I possess).

My favorite part of the exchange? Well, I found out on I think it was Monday of Christmas week that I had 14 days to "upgrade". I was forced into a middle-of-the-holidays system switch. I didn't have time to deal with it during the week of Christmas. I finally started messing around with it on Monday of the following week, discovered I had issues pretty quickly, emailed the help desk on Monday night. Got an answer Tuesday which didn't really answer the question I'd asked. Well, I'd worded my question badly. I tried to clarify what I was asking but got no answer. Figured out the thing about old Blogger vs. new Blogger, emailed again, still no answer.

Customer support had basically hung up on me after the morning of the 29th.

This morning's email included this helpful advice:

"Please make sure you are contacting us not in a weekend or on holidays if you need an immediate assistance."

I absolutely can't understand why JS-Kit decided to do this switch over a period of time when they must have KNOWN they were going to be short-staffed (like every single company in this country during the last 2 weeks of the year). Seems like if a company is providing a service that a lot of people use, and decides to suddenly spring a profound change to that service on those people, the absolute first thing they'd want to do is make sure that all hands will be on deck to help their users through the transition.

Oh well.

On the plus side, hey, that did finally inspire me to update my blogrolls, which were hopelessly out of date!
*********************************

The Best of Help Desks:

To close on a positive note, here's a similar topic, only different! I have just got to say that folks at the B&H Photo Live Chat support center ROCK. I finally broke my old WP20 over Thanksgiving. Might have been fixable, but I'd been thinking about getting a new one anyways, the WP80 had some appealing features & I'd apparently also managed to somehow abrade the surface of the 20's lens just enough that once a blob of water got on it, it wouldn't come off without being wiped off with a dry piece of cotton. Fine as long as I could get into my dayhatch, but that didn't work in rough stuff like, oh, f'r'instance, heavy chop off Montauk:

From 5 Years Around Long Island, Year 3

(that's a new album, btw, finally got to uploading those over the holidays but didn't quite manage captions yet, so it's 140 pictures, 0 explanations, give me another weekend or two & there'll be a storyline there!)

So when I finally dropped the WP20 for the last time (the shortest little fall, in a padded bag even, but enough to jar something in just the wrong way), instead of sending the old one back to Pentax for repair, I just decided to go for the WP80. I went to B&H on 11/29/2009 & came home with a pretty blue one.

On 1/1/2010, without one bit of abuse, the new one simply stopped working. It was past the 15 day return date. I wasn't expecting an exchange when I contacted their chatline, I was just trying to figure out whether I should send it to Pentax or bring it back to the store (I'd bought the B&H extended warranty service so I wasn't sure which was right). I described the problem. "What's your email?" typed Nathan. I provided that. "Do you still have the packaging?" he asked. "Yes", I typed. "OK, I just emailed you a return authorization. We'll exchange that for you."

Faaaaantastic!!!

Happy New Year! Photo gallery from the Sebago Frostbite Regatta 2010

From Sebago Frostbite Regatta!

(ps - is it just me, or does "2010" just sound insanely futuristic?)

Last 2 Paddles of 2009

From December '09 Paddling & Hiking

"Staycations" were apparently all the rage this year, so being the trendy person I am, naturally I just had to make my Christmas/New Year break a non-travelling one!

No, actually I just felt like I could use some time at home - and it's worked out really well. Of course TQ made it better than I ever expected by coming to Brooklyn - I knew he was planning to visit his parents so figured I'd meet him up there, but then he decided to add a Brooklyn stop to his travels & that was great.

This week was free for catching up on the household stuff - Tuesday was the high point of the staycation, as I had a handyman stop by in the morning & fix the bathtub faucet that's been leaking for a couple of months now (boy is it nice to not have to go under the sink to turn the hot water on), and then in the afternoon I I took the subway to Yesterday's News, a very nice little secondhand shop, and they had EXACTLY the kind of little bookcase I'd hoped they might have, fits perfectly in a certain corner where I'd wanted to put a little bookcase - I'd started to have little piles of books all over the place because I had completely run out of bookshelf space & this took care of a few of those. Also finally gave me a good place to put TQ's '08 Christmas gift, a digital picture frame, so last night I spent a very enjoyable evening sorting through my digital pictures files & loading my favorite pictures onto a chip, which is now plugged into the digital picture frame sitting on the inexpensive but attractive (real wood, not Ikea particleboard!) secondhand bookshelf that's filled with books that were formerly living in little random piles on the floor. These are ALL the sorts of things that I've been wanting to do for ages, just never seem to have the time or energy to do. I am missing TQ tonight, wish we could be together for New Year's, but it does make me very happy that I've actually managed to do a lot of the stuff I'd hoped to get done with this "Staycaytion".

Of course, I'd also hoped to do a little PADDLING!!! And I did! :D

The weather's been pretty wild here in the last two weeks of 2009 - we've really run the gamut! My vacation started with a blizzard, of course, and then this week started with gale-force winds (way over my personal limits for winter paddling, no matter how itchy I am for a paddle, checking NOAA & seeing GALE WARNING always makes me decide to skip it)- but there's been some fantastically beautiful days in there too and counting tomorrow's Frostbite Regatta (even though that tends to be a relatively short paddle), I will have gotten in at least 4 paddles over the 2 weeks. Not bad for winter!

The first of the staycation paddles was, of course, that tour of Mill Basin I wrote up earlier this week.

The second was at the instigation of Steve H, the Paddling Chef, who looked at the forecast on Sunday, saw conditions like you see in the picture on top (the dredger Padre Island, moored just outside the Paerdegat, possibly deepening the channel in preparation for bringing in the equipment for replacing our bridge) & called for a paddle. Great call. Milton & I took him up on that. I had the radio on on Sunday morning as I was collecting my kit & did an aural double-take when I heard the announcer say it was 46 degrees - but I heard him right!

Steve picked me up at 9:30; naturally we stopped for tamales again (yay). Martin was waiting for us at the club & we were out on the water as soon after that as we could manage.

The guys were both paddling their beautiful hand-made Greenland-style skin-on-frames. I wish I'd taken a picture of the three of 'em side by side, I would've captioned it "How to make a Romany feel fat".

The water was just mirror-smooth as we set out.


It was a little bit breezy out on the bay - here we are approaching Ruffle Bar. We stopped on this side for a tea break.


Steve suggested lunch here. I was a bit chilly in the breeze & asked if we could nip around to the other side of the island. We did, and Steve found a lovely camel (neither dromedary nor bactrian, but the wooden variety* that serves as a sort of permanent fender around some docks) in the lee of some brush. We had our picnic there, the tamales were as delicious as they were on Tamale Paddle I, and I think we were all half-tempted to lie down & take a little post-tamale nap. It's a rare Northeast winter day when you want to take a nap in the sun on an island in the middle of Jamaica Bay, even with full winter paddling gear on - it felt positively luxurious!

Instead of napping, we did a little beachcombing (although the water was getting pretty high by that point - if we had dozed off, we would've first needed to make sure we had our boats pulled up far enough to keep the rising tide from floating them away) and then set off.


As we rounded the end of Ruffle Bar and the towers of Manhattan came into view, I was blown away by the clarity of the air. I don't think I've ever seen the city quite so clearly defined - there's almost always at least a little haze.


When we got back near the dredger, we stopped to do a few rolls. Warming up (so to speak) for the Frostbite Regatta!

We got back to the clubhouse to find that Stevie, who had been a little under the weather for paddling, had come to hang out for a bit. More luxury, he already had the fire going! Dennis was puttering around the grounds & he came in & joined us too & I think we just all hung out shooting the breeze for at least another hour.

My third paddle of the vacation - and last of 2009 - was yesterday. At one point, conditions yesterday (the 30th) and today (the 31st) were looking pretty OK. Wednesday was supposed to be right around freezing & still a bit on the breezy side, although nothing like Tuesday's icy blast, but pretty and sunny; today, the winds were supposed to die down & there was supposed to be snow turning to rain. I checked to see if anybody else wanted to go. No answers except from Stevie with an outside possibility of joining me if I went on Thursday. Wednesday morning, I checked the forecast against. Wind in the afternoon had settled down to 5-10 kts. Sunny. Thursday? "Ice pellets".

That settled it. I took my last paddle of 2009 yesterday & it was truly stunning. I'd initially thought I'd just do another shortish one over to Mill Basin & back, but it was so beautiful that I ended up putting in around 10 miles, out around the islands & through the marshes. Never got out of my boat, only stopped to take pictures & eventually put on lights. The last leg of my roughly triangular course, returning to the Paerdegat, was amazing - to my left, mother-of-pearl sunset in the sky and on the water - to my right, the nearly full moon rising & reflecting in a silver trail - in front of me, the city, with the lights just beginning to go on...now this is incredibly corny but I found a song I know running through my head, and it goes -

Now I walk in beauty
Beauty lies before me
Beauty is behind me
Above and below me

So. A good finish to my paddling year. Enough talking about it,

Heading down the Paerdegat.


Buoy 12, well rimed from the gales of the preceding days.


Rainbow around the sun (at Elder's Point Marsh).


J-Bay goes golden


Frosted marsh


In the shallow, quiet marsh areas I was paddling through heading for Ruffle Bar, ice was beginning to form in the water, too, from the slush that salt water becomes when it first begins to freeze up to very soft plates on the surface. I stayed right-side up for this trip!


Approaching sunset near Ruffle Bar. Just me and the birds out there.


Moon rising over Ruffle Bar


And that is the last of my 2009 paddling photos.

Next post, Sebago's Frostbite Regatta 2010!

Hauoli Makahiki Hou to all!

*About that camel? That's just one of a number of the interesting animal names you'll find attached to things in a harbor. Earlier this month, the marvelous Bowsprite charmed & delighted all of her readers with a post entitled A Nautical Bestiary - you'll find camels there, and all sorts of other sea-beasties from bees to zinc fish. Oh, and if you happen to be dabbler in traditional music, like me, or even an actual musician, I think you'll get a giggle out of the post about sea chanteys that's the prior post linked to at the end of the Bestiary post.

Please stand by, we are experiencing technical difficulties...

JS-Kit called it an "upgrade", but I'm not of the same opinion.

I'm talking about the comments, of course. Tried leaving one lately? It's not as simple as it used to be.

This blog is fast approaching the 5-year mark. When I started blogging, Blogger's comment system didn't have a character-recognition feature to filter out the junk, and the spambots ran amok. Haloscan offered a simple, free comment system that a lot of people were using. I installed that & was happy enough with it that even though Blogger did get their comment system upgraded to the point where it worked a lot better, I never bothered switching back.

Well, now JS-Kit has purchased Haloscan & all of us Haloscan users were given the option of "upgrading" to Echo (which is that -- thing -- that you see now when you try to leave a comment).

I wish I'd taken the option of exporting when it was offered, but I had no idea how radically different the Echo was going to be.

I'm now trying to get my comments back onto Blogger's system but even that is complicated by the age of my blog - it would seem that I have got an old-school Blogger setup, to the extent the uninstallation instructions at JS-Kit direct me to go to a tab that does not exist for me. If you're a Blogger blogger, you probably have something called "Layout" that maybe features buttons that you click to change features? I have got something called "Template", which is a window that shows the HTML for the blog. Customization was all done by pasting code into that same window. There are no buttons to click to revert.

Ain't progress wunnerful?

Anyways, I've got somebody at JS-Kit trying to help me out (I think, although I never heard back from her after I tried to clarify about the non-existent tab - I suspect they are a bit swamped, though, so I may just be working my way up the queue). I do hope to be back on Blogger comments before too much longer.

Whether all the comments left on Haloscan ever make it into that system remains to be seen. That's a sad thing to contemplate - I frequently think the comments end up being as interesting, if not more interesting, than my original posts!

BTW if there happen to be any other "old-school" Blogger users reading this & you have any hints, I'd love to hear them.

If you can figure out how to use "Echo", that is!

:(