I've been investigating some new tools, processes, and hosts for this blog. But since this whole blog is an exercise in navel gazing, I'm probably the only one who cares.

If it makes any difference, I'd like to keep the URLs consistent between this installation and wherever the blog ends up – but I'm not 100 percent sure that that matters in any real sense. If you're interested, I'm thinking about either moving my host to Microsoft Azure or maybe to an Office 365 SharePoint site. Not sure right now, and not sure if it matters.

In any case, this is mostly just a post to see if Word makes a decent blog posting tool – Windows Live Writer is still the best tool that I've used, but I'll "make do" with Word if I have to.

The Brambly Hill web site has been down for a couple of weeks -- something went wrong with the hosting system, and then I messed up the code for the underlying blog software somehow, and then I got frustrated trying to get it fixed and left it sit for a while.

In any case, I've managed to get the servers up and running, get a new version of blogengine.NET up and running, and get all of the posts from the last 10 years copied from the old system to the new. I wish I'd been paying better attention to how I backed up the posts so I didn't have to do a copy/paste job for all of them, but I'm finished now and things should be back to normal.

Which means a post about once every six months or so. If I'm lucky.

Welcome back.

Still here. Still alive. And now coming to you via the magic of the mobile and connected Web.

The company bought us all Windows 7 phones -- partly to seed the market and partly because they know that if they give us a way to work all the time, we will. Verizon was late to the party, but I finally got my new phone this week.

I'm not sure if it saves me time or if it makes me more productive, but it does make it easy to be spontaneous. Take this post for example, wouldn't be making it without the new phone. And the geocaching application makes it easy to find a cache whenever you have time -- no need to plan ahead, just map the cache nearest to where you are and grab it.

Could be that is the benefit of the new 4th generation phones -- they put the Web in your hand so you don't have to think about it, it's just there.

I turned off comments. Again. I'm not sure that I've ever received a single legitimate comment on this site. For that matter, I'm not 100 percent sure that any other than me has ever looked at the content on this site. In any case, I'm tired of going through 500 comments just to delete them all. It's not even fun to read the fake comments anymore.

And to the person(s) who use some form of "Your Web site is ugly" as their comment-spam comment: Really, find something else to say. It's bad enough that you are polluting the Web with comment spam to begin with, but to add insult to the injury? If I was the kind of person who believed in Hell I would be the kind of person that hoped for a special place for you.

Turns out I made a couple mistakes setting up Commentor on the Web site. Another 300+ comments. Another 300+ to delete. I suppose there may have been one or two legitimate comments in there, and if yours was one of them I apologize for making it go away.

Someone even spammed my blog – while I was deleting the other blog spam.

I installed the BlogEngine.NET Commentor extension tonight and turned comments back on. Let's see if anybody other than me is reading this thing.

Looked at my archive page today for the first time in a couple of weeks. There were almost 300 comments on the postings.

Every single one of them blog spam.

I enjoyed the "you need a new wordpress template" for my BlogEngine.NET site. Those were good. But I think my favorites were the ones that said "Beautiful! Amazing!" on posts that said things like "I had the worst day ever"; and the ones that said "you need to improve the look and usability of your site." That's right, encourage me to leave a post that insults me.

Anyway, I disabled comments on the site until I get a blog spam filter. Looks like Commenter is the one to use, so I'll be loading it and enabling it soon. 'Til then, sorry you can't comment. Not that anyone did.

If you visit our site often (and how many of you do, really?) you may notice it's got a new look. I've switched to using BlogEngine.NET to manage the content. Hopefully using BlogEngine will make it easier for me to keep the site up-to-date since I'll be able to edit from any Internet connected PC. For example, I've already fixed a couple of typos on the front page that were just too much trouble to clean up with the old way of working with the site.

Over the next few days (weeks) the site will keep changing as I work on getting BlogEngine to display it the way I want it to look.

I found out today that my old Web site, digger.whidbey.winisp.net, is getting closed down.

Quick like a bunny I downloaded the contents of the Web site to my hard drive so I wouldn't loose any of my old logs. I'll be re-entering them here over the next few days, which means a few oddities in the logs, like a 2009 creation date on a 2002 log entry.

This morning when one of my co-workers (also a sailor) was searching for pictures of the Windrose 22 so he could see what Odyssey looks like, he ended up here when he searched Google for "Windrose 22". The specs page is the very first hit, and my Sailing home page is the second.

I'm feeling kinda smug right now.

Added 28 January 2004:

Well that didn't last long.

Today I tried googling "Windrose 22" again. I looked through 13 pages of responses and didn't find my pages. Sailnet Boat Check was first and second, a complaint about an apartment complex was third, and the Whispernauts site was fourth. Odyssey's site couldn't even be found.

Oh how fleeting is fame...