#5 The Thing Is... Back!

Having just completed my unsuccessful bid to be elected School Trustee, I found myself with a Blog that I had set up specifically for the purposes of promoting my views on the issues for the election.

Now that the election is over, this Blog will continue as a forum for me to write brief essays on topics that interest me. I hope these essays will be of interest or some amusement to at least a small number of people.

The thing is, I've already done this once before. Back in the mid-nineties, I decided that maybe I could write a weekly column in a newspaper or something. So, to build up a portfolio in case the opportunity to have a weekly column ever presented itself, I began to write little pieces about whatever topic I felt enough interest in at the time.

And then my hard drive crashed. It started with a Trojan Horse that wiped the boot sector. And then I bought Norton Disk Doctor, which claimed to be specifically for compressed drives. Well, not for compressed DOS 6.22 drives apparently, because after I ran that the drive was completely corrupted.

Sitting on a shelf in my office is a 100MB hard drive that has been waiting pathetically for fifteen years to be resurrected by some magic wizard with a de-Nortonizer and a re-boot-sectorizer.

Even at the time, I did not mourn for the loss of my recently completed CD database, basically an Excel spreadsheet with several tabs, one of which listed all of my CDs and another of which listed all of the songs on those CDs.

However there are four files on that drive that I would like to see recovered.

One is my write-up of an amazing conversation I had with Anthony Ainley at Visions '93.

The other three are those first three 'columns' that I wrote at the time, the topics of which I haven't a clue.

The name of that column was, “The Thing Is” (possibly with an exclamation point or ellipses, but I don't know). And that is why the title on this Blog entry is not #1 The Thing Is... Back! Perhaps one day #1-#3 will be brought back into existence. First I'll need to re-install the 100MB hard drive into my 486/33, last known to be running Windows 3.1.

And what about The Thing Is #4? I found it unexpectedly on my hard drive while saving a copy of today's post. I had forgotten all about it, and apparently I wrote it in 2008. It may give the best example of what #1-#3 would have been like. I will post it next time. And coming soon, I will write about my election bid.

I doubt I will be posting daily, like You Are Dumb does, but I will strive for a weekly update.

Reader comments are welcome, but will be moderated ruthlessly and spitefully.

November 21, 2011