Hello World (once again!)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2014/04/03 15:17 +00:00, original URI: https://sortingitoutv2.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/hello-world-once-again/

I started my Blog in November 2004. A mere 27 months since I first became a fulltime employee @ Microsoft and was eligible to author a Blog on my own @ http://blogs.msdn.com and I honestly wasn’t sure that I would really ever enjoy it.

The first month I wrote only two blogs. I realized nobody would even care what I thought if I didn’t build up some really useful content.

So on the second month (December), I wrote a blog every day, even on Saturday and Sunday. I set an ambitious goal: if someone I respect doesn’t notice the Blog about quirky topics like internationalization within a month, then I’d give it up and do something else with my time. Then I just sat back and worried.

Perhaps I should have set the bar higher. Because in less than two weeks, Raymond Chen himself was pointing at my Blog, and several of the blogs within it. It was like I had arrived or something!

So after that, and over the next ten years I wrote no less than one blog a month and for one blessed month one hundred blogs a month, before finally settling into a more predictable posting pattern for my readers.

Over that decade, I’ve gone through twenty seven “romantic” relationships (the life of serial monogamy!). I’ve lost relatives, gained nieces, burned bridges, lived through being snowed out for a month, met half a dozen execs and wrote about most of them, had an online nervous breakdown over a best friend passing away and then later finding out she was interested in going out with me.

In all that time and with those thousands and thousands of blogs, there are only two that I sincerely regretted.

The first one saw my manager’s manager’s manager’s HR Generalist put me on Paid Administrative Leave while she worked with experts to determine if VP Brian Valentine was justified in simply firing me (that skip skip level manager defended me in a meeting with Brian that I was not invited to).

In the end, it turned out be mainly due to the art (it was that infamous RSOD post that Slashdot covered because of the art.

The second one was after I was granted a patent that I honestly believed never should have been issued. My manager at the time asked the site admin to take down the entire Blog and he did that so thoroughly that I can’t even look at any Blog on the site!

Once again, the principal factor seems to have been the art, since I took a picture of that patent plaque with my Nokia Lumia 920 (my favorite until I was early upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 1520!), and someone read the patent number off of the plaque, and suddenly the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze with the Blog.

Maybe he was right.

Yet not a week goes by where 2-5 people send me email to one of my three commonly used email addresses. Clearly the story isn’t yet over.

Thanks to The Internet Archive @ http://archive.org/ most of the Blog is available in a not so searchable form. According to that site:

…….. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/

Saved 137 times between May 29, 2010 and February 12, 2014

But I repeatedly proved that most of my traffic came from Bing and Google searches, which The Internet Archive does not support, so all I can do is watch my Klout score (that I never cared about before) go down week after week, currently it is @ an all time low 42, but I suspect it will soon be worse.

And yet I cannot give up on this quest.

So here I am. Once again. Trying to Sort it all out, save some famous never seen before elsewhere blogs, and maybe write some new ones.

I’m not sure how often I’ll post, or even if it will ultimately be worth it for others. I humbly leave that judgment to you, the reader…

# Alec McAllister on April 7, 2014 at 2:09 PM:

go to newer or older post, or back to index or month or day