First post.

How clever.

Server move is done, and spooled mail is starting to roll in. If you sent mail over the weekend, we should have it soon.

I'll ditch the St. Patrick's wallpaper this evening.

My first instinct was slow down, so I started to apply the brakes before my brain kicked in. Luckily my brain kicked in about a second later and I took my foot OFF the brakes. That's when the fishtailing started... but we were on a slight decline, and eventually I slid off the road. Normally this would probably not be a huge deal except I happened to slide over quite a few saplings and a whole lot of brush. Indeed, the car had one wheel off the right side on the edge of a culvert, and one wheel on the left side was off the ground because we were resting on brush at about a forty-five degree angle, maybe more. I had one of those movie flashbacks where the people try to move really slowly so the car doesn't plunge off the cliff.

Fellow AOLer syntart dealt us a blow by resigning this week:

After six years at AOL, I am now moving on and have accepted a position as an Operations project manager at Sunrocket, a VoIP provider. I will be providing support on the day-to-day activities of the Operations department, which will allow me to gain experience in a variety of areas and broaden my knowledge of how to run an Operations set-up.

Having worked with Lee for nearly four years now, I hate to see her go. Good luck though!

How I wish that bma allowed comments on his blog.

None of the content or opinions are the property or opinion of my employer. Now that that is out of the way...

It's been suggested that my old "about" page is crap. It was certainly stiffer than Al Gore.

This is the personal weblog of Richard Morgan, a rapidly greying tech guy operating under the premise that someone will read this stuff, although I think that the Google Bots are my main consumers.

I'm a system administrator with a large technology and media company where I help my teammates secure and protect their many systems and applications. I take lots of photos, many of which get posted here, promptly at 6am daily, mostly in lieu of rising to write something witty and full of pith. Some of them are even good.

Things I like: Subarus, my kids, digital cameras, the web, old postcards, Bull Run Mountain, genealogy, Linux ("of course you do," you murmur and sidle away...) and the shortest day of the year. Oh, and XM Radio. A lot.

Please leave a comment on a posting or shoot me an email.

You can find the site archives at: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007. Wow, finishing up Year #4 here.

You can find me on twitter if you need up-to-the-minute info.

Want your readers to come back? EchoDitto offers some advice. Here's a taste:

Most blog readers scan dozens of blogs everyday, but they actually spend very little time on any one blog - thus your goal is to grab them quickly and hold them. Readers have only a handful of blogs that they read carefully. You want to be one of them.

There are three basic keys to building a successful blog:

- Engage with other blogs and your own readers
- Keep the material fresh and exciting
- Give people a reason to return

Slim-pickin's around here.

We'll be heading out in the afternoon for our New Year's Eve enjoyment, so here's some thoughts on 2006 and this blogging thing.

• I did about 245 postings for the year.
• 81 one of them, about a third of all, were "Daily Photo" entries. 81 is not 'daily', but it's better than zero.
• My foray into a separate locale-based blog, The Prince William Citizen, died of neglect and has been buried.
• My Rockwell site needs some attention, stat!
• I'm getting about 130K hits/month these days, which is all objects, including ~52% images.
• My private blog has been immensely popular among friends and family.
• My blog-reading tastes have changed, with the biggies (Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Powerline) falling out of my interest. Ceaseless political arguing wears one down.
• Blosxom is still holding up and I find new (but small) ways to customize it fairly often.
• This is my favorite photo posted this year, even though I took it over the 2005 holidays.

All in all, I'm proud of the effort and appreciate the journaling nature of this format. Looking down the road, many years in the future, I wonder (and not-so-secretly hope) if my girls will appreciate having my writing at hand, even if much of it is on nonsensical topics. I'd kill for a steadily-kept journal from my grandparents.

No major changes for 2007 are planned. I've launched the Texana sub-site and will work on fleshing out that section.

Thanks for stopping in or subscribing to my feeds! Happy New Year!