I'm going to attempt to convert my Blog over the next 2 days - it's going to be a challenge, I have to rework how everything operates, but I'll probably end up with a nicer looking blog in the end because I have to re-do the template.

If this works, my pages will be going from .asp to .htm.

I'll have less control over the information I log, but I'll also have a redirect to my old programmed content on something like custom.richgautier.com - I haven't worked out the details yet...

So....see you on the other side....

Dear Google:

I have used Blogger for 11+ years as the text content engine to my website. I used Blogger before Google owned Blogger, and the original product was so much better than what you have turned it into.

Blogger was originally designed as a content management tool, not just for vanilla blogs, but for people who needed a way to manage all kinds of published content.

I would have happily paid for such a service over the years, but you never asked for anything other than a link advertising Blogger at the bottom of my pages. At no time did you tell me that supporting a basic functionality of the Internet - FTP - was costing you more money than you made back from me.

All of my pages are indexed at Google, with .asp extensions - with a PageRank befitting my little piece of the web. Your replacement product will no longer support my website, its design and structure, or my purposes. Even if I migrate my content, all of my links will be changed, and I will no longer be able to customize my content programatically.

You've also given me less than two months to migrate to new tools, effectively freezing my content until I find a new content management tool.

Thank you so much for caring so much about your customers, especially those who have been with you since the beginning.

If you should happen to run into the fun guys who originally made Blogger, could you ask them kindly to come back and re-deploy their original product, maybe under a new umbrella? I could really use a customizable content management system right about now.

Well, it's been a good 10 year run - but I'm about to have to switch my Blogging site to some new configuration. Blogger.com – No Longer Support of FTP Publishing in Blogger after March 26 – Webmove – Mashable Web Blog What really sucks is that I use a custom ASP web site that won't be supported by their option. I'm going to have to switch over from Blogger to an on-site blogging system, which means lots of development effort on my part - and I have about a month and a half to do it.

Having lived in Jersey, the first thing I thought when reading Highway becomes runway: Aircraft makes emergency landing on New Jersey Turnpike was: He's going to have to pay the maximum toll when he gets off because he doesn't have his entrance ticket.

This morning I was walking my dog, and in his haste to find a comfortable place to do what he does on walks, he yanked the leash to its end. This would have been all well and good on any other day, but on this day, I had decided to do some multi-tasking, reading my Kindle on the walk.
My poor Kindle 1 leaped from my grasp and tumbled two full twists before hitting the cement walkway. As I yelled profanities at the dog, I knelt down and cradled the pieces of my poor abused electronic book and slid the back onto the unit, cradling it back into the (haha!) protective leather case.

Damaged..the screen connections were damaged. My poor e-book had taken a hit to the top-left corner of the screen, and it had ripped apart the e-ink screen connectors, so there were now lines running both across and down the left and top of my display. Sadness, pure sadness, ran through my soul. This is an expensive book. I had paid a good chunk of change for this unit some time ago. Sure I had received $80 cash back from Bing, but I bought the unit right before the 2nd gen Kindle arrived, so I still ended up paying more than the current full price.

After looking on the web for suggestions, I tried the reset button (no dice), and eventually called Kindle Customer Service at Amazon. Upon calling Amazon at first I received a call center with a heavily accented customer service rep. My hopes were almost dashed at being understood, when he passed me on to 'Kindle Customer Support', which appeared to be staffed by understanding and caring English-speaking folk. They understood what had happened and at first promised to take care of me.

That is, until I got to the second representative. He identified that the unit was out of warranty, and I told him that I knew that and would be willing to pay for repairs, and THIS is where I decided to not replace my Kindle with another Kindle.

It can't be repaired. They don't repair the units. Not even the units that are in fine working order except for the screen. They only replace them. And they only replace them with newer units. WHAT!?!?!??!!?! No, no, no! The Kindle 1 has a replaceable battery and takes memory cards that allow me to separate my library, and store much more material. The Kindle 2 buttons aren't as good as the Kindle 1. Yet, the rep categorized the Kindle 2 as an upgrade. Some upgrade! And I'd be paying for a new unit that I liked less? What kind of a deal is that?

Now, back to the luddite comment. If I had dropped the book I was reading (a 19th century text on 'How to Live on 24 Hours a Day'), it wouldn't have dented and become unreadable. It may have become unbound, being more than 100 years old, but I'd have been able to see the top lines of the text when I gathered the sheets from the ground. Perhaps one page may have torn, nay two, but not each and every page of that book and every other book in my library safe at home. It is things like these that make me pine for the old ways, assuring me, over and over, that the new ways are not always better, and in some ways worse.

My poor Kindle. Someone tell Jeff Bezos that his 'upgraded' Kindle isn't getting my vote. I'll use my poor Kindle 1 until the day I can't read the screen at all (which may be soon if I drop it again), but I'll be damned if I replace it at full cost with a unit that takes more capabilities away from me. The fact that a manufacturer no longer supports equipment for repair at less than 2 years after you buy it is disappointing and goes to show just what kind of throw-away consumer society we've become. I am sorely disappointed in Amazon's inability to support their product, but they're certainly not the only ones. I'd pay extra at this point for something with a 10-year warranty (not that dropping should be a covered event). Maybe I'll go out into my garage and hug my Stanley and Craftsman tools.

Just noticed that the grandfather clock has the wrong time and the pendulum isn't swinging. I've long since learned to ignore the chimes on the hour and the half. As I get up to wind it, 945 email messages are flowing from my main Internet provider's mailbox into Outlook to be sorted, categorized and, for the most part, ignored.

Life has its maintenance tasks, and during the holidays and vacations, we tend not to keep up with them. I have no idea what day the clock stopped or when the family server went down. Someone must have hit the switch before we left on vacation because I couldn't connect to it remotely while I was away. The majority of the email is SPAM anyway, or something that interested me for a while and I want to make time for, but haven't the time to make.

My grandfather clock is now back tick-tocking, and my Bayesian filters are busily sorting the month's email I haven't read. Glancing at the bill box, I have some more maintenance to do this weekend. I know I've paid many of them, but I know of at least 2 that I've neglected to take care of over the holiday.

Well, back to life and its doldrums...

I've been blogging for almost ten years now. I started out hyperlinking just about every topic in my blog because I believed in the hypertext possibility of the web. Back ten years ago, my posts would have 5 or six links in each post, linking to people, companies, anything I was talking about. Nowadays I just write. Over the years, I've become even more self-conscious about what I write, too. Sitting locked up in the snow house today I was looking at some of my old blog posts. Some of them are just inane now. Some of the postings are like looking at the Internet Dead Pool, covering tech ideas that just never went anywhere...

I don't want to delete the whole thing and start over - but primarily because I'm not sure I would replace it with anything better. The historical significance of a running online diary isn't lost on me either.

Begrudgingly, I may have to start driving to work. Even with a wreck on 495 this morning delaying traffic near the interchange, I was still in to work 15 minutes early, and I even stopped at the McDonald's drivethrough for a cup of hot chocolate on my way in. In the rain and the dark and I still shaved a half hour off my commute by driving to work, who'd have thunk? Getting off base yesterday was no big deal either, even though it looks bad as a pedestrian, it added maybe 10 minutes in reality.

Got home and went to the gym yesterday to do my cardio....I'm up to about 370 calories per 30 minutes - working myself a bit harder each week. It's a shame the gym I go to doesn't have punching bags or something besides the leg-based cardio machines. I'd like to mix up the workout a bit - maybe burn some big calories for jumping around. Somewhere in my garage there's a racquetball racquet I should dig out.

I think I may have figured out what I want for Christmas, a Glock 17C. I fired the 19 over the weekend and I wasn't as happy with it as the 17 from the week before. I definitely like feel of firing the 9mm rounds, but the smaller pistol doesn't fill my hands as well. I just need to buy a gun safe for the house, and then I'll probably buy it - even if I decide not to keep it in the long run - the resale value should allow me to save some money at the range on ammunition over the next year.

I had Virtual PC 2007 up and running for my lab PC at home, and it's been quite a while since I've used it. Over the weekend, I logged onto Microsoft's site and see that the current version of Virtual PC is only supported for Windows 7 installs. Sigh, where does the time go? It was only yesterday when I upgraded the family server to WinXP Pro. Of course, my mutifunction printer probably won't have compatible drivers again, leading me down the whole equipment upgrade path.

I've considered using VirtualBox instead but recall some networking issue from the last time. I also have to find a distro to play with, as Im pretty sure I havent kept the lab VM up to date. There's about 10 different projects I want to work on, some graphical, some not.

Well, just rambling on..nothing to read here.

Every now and again I have to go and create a new email address. My old addresses get overrun with SPAM, because I'm not good about keeping my private life separated from my online life. These marketers just sell your email address to anybody, who then resell your address to someone else, and so on and so on.

It makes email a pointless way to try to contact anyone for anything important, because your message will just be lost in a sea of hopeless JU$T BUY C14LIS!! crap that's flooding the person's box.

I even have fairly effective anti-spam software that does a fairly good job of separating the wheat from the chaff...but I fear having to pick up my mail after a week of not reading it. I just downloaded 746 email messages, of which I want to read maybe 2. I'll have to filter through about 50 that the filters don't pick up either.

I'm going to change the way that I deal with email. I'm going to create a whitelist for the email that I want to get, and create a filter that dumps it into one folder, and then ignore the Inbox. Email needs to go more the way of how Facebook and other social networks work where you have to befriend someone to send them a message.

We started off at the small arms range. We rented a 9mm and fired off 100 rounds of ammo at 15 and 22 yards. Only one silhouette miss in the 2 boxes of ammo. At 22 yards, I don't see how or why I would be using a pistol to shoot someone at that range. If someone is that far away from me, I'd be more interested in breaking off contact than trying to hit them with a pistol round. Although I haven't made a decision on whether I want to break down and buy a pistol, it was a great deal of fun hitting the targets today. If I do want to keep shooting, it might be less expensive to have my own firearm, though - at $10 for the rental and having to buy ammo from the gunshop at $20.+ a box, I could probably save some bucks if I'm going to make a habit of the range. Of course, then I also need a gun safe for the house....but I could get a gun I like - pros/cons, etc...

Then off to lunch at Johnny Rockets, where I had a burger and fries - and my son had a big old double. The waitress drew little smiley faces in the ketchup trays she handed to us, and lunch was very filling and came in under $20 for both of us. We stopped at the movie theater, but there really was nothing that we 'had' to see enough to justify the price of the ticket.

From there we went shopping for some simple consumer goods at a local conglomerate. I bought some cheap DVDs and a new belt.

Then we went to my FAVORITE place - the bookstore. We bought some books and a magazine (with a DVD in it) and one of those Entertainment coupon books. I'm looking forward to reading Hakin9 magazine, as I've never seen it before and it looks interesting. One of the books we got was a history of guns, one of those big books that are always on sale. My son is upstairs devouring that one and a big Astronomy book. On the way home he told me he wants to take Astronomy instead of Physics for his senior year - even after I told him he'd still be learning physics, he still seemed genuinely interested in taking the alternative course. I'm actually pretty happy about him being interested in a hard science.

Those of you who know me know that since the end of July, I have been working out, going to the gym on an almost daily basis (6 times a week most weeks) and have been burning down some serious calories. However, most of the people that I know don't see me very often, if at all. I'd like to make the change a little more real to them. I have lost 5 inches on my waist. I have lost close to 30 pounds. My body shape has turned upside down from a beer bellied old man to a triangle-shaped middle-aged guy. I was just looking in the mirror, and I am having a hard time getting over myself.

For those of you who don't know me - this is a big deal. I haven't been under 200 pounds since 17 years ago. I intend to tip the scale at under 200 this week. How did I do it? I'll tell you my secret. No, it's not acai berries. No, it's not Scardsdale, Atkins or South Beach. It was just that I DECIDED TO DO IT. I COMMITTED TO IT AND I STUCK WITH IT. You can do it too. A good buddy of mine told me that there's three ways to lose weight - eat less, move more or both. Am I eating less? Yes - but not how you'd think. I've had three slices of pumpkin pie this week. I've snacked on M&Ms. In fact, I am eating less, but only because I'm paying attention to what I'm putting in my mouth. I don't sit and idly eat a canister of cashews while I'm at work. I've replaced mindless snacking with conscious eating. When I eat, I pay attention to what I'm doing.

Am I moving more? You betcha - I joined a gym, and I track my workouts and my calories burned on the treadmill. I burn down about 20 ice-cream sundaes a month according to my logs. 30 minutes a day of cardio, and then another 30 or more of weight lifting.

If you REALLY want to lose weight - here's a free diet plan for you. EAT LESS, MOVE MORE - 3500 calories per pound - the math isn't that hard, and the first 10 pounds are easy as hell. Drink lots of water...and enjoy a new you.