We’ll be Back

OK, so, summarizing and expanding on what I posted on Facebook.

Contrary to rumor, I am neither deceased nor imprisoned, nor have I fallen off the planet. :-) Nobody else "has my computer", and I have never lost internet access for more than a few days during moves. It is unfortunately true that the BBS is currently down, and has been for over a year. My apologies to Gondorf and anyone else who has missed it. It will be back up soon. It is also true that I have not been involved in IRC, Digg, IM, or any other online activities for over a year.

In short, when my marriage -- of 30+ years duration -- broke, almost two years ago, I went through all the stages of grief: even though it was completely my fault. I have been undergoing transformation, consolidation, and reassessment since it happened. I was content to let the BBS run on autopilot, which I have many times before, but when I started having computer problems about six months later, I had no energy to fight back.

But I'm recovering. Life goes on. I just bought a quad-core Win7 computer. I will be restarting the BBS within the next few weeks or months. Due to the length of time elapsed and new versions of Tradewars 2002, everything will start at zero. In the next few days, I will be reappearing in IRC, Messenger, etc. It is regrettable that I was obliged to withdraw, but necessary. I apologize for ignoring everyone.

My 30+ year marriage broke in early October, 2009, and I was pretty much kicked out on the street without a penny to my name, with just a suitcase. Not that I didn’t deserve it: but I would have never done it to her no matter what she did, and in fact put up with some pretty incredible torture for 10 years before that happened. But that’s not important now. I have my memories of the first 20 good years.,

After a few weeks in hotels I landed in an apartment, got the BBS up and running again, and it ran along just fine, more or less, until about May of 2010, when I had what seemed to be a simple hard drive failure. I reinstalled everything, but stuff was still wonky. Some things just refused to run for no good or consistent reason. I did a repair install which seemed to correct much of the issues but not all. It took several months to get to that stage. Since the BBS had already been down for several months at that time, I didn’t see a huge hurry to get it back up again, even though a couple of my few remaining users were pestering me without mercy, probably just out of concern for me.

Anyway it seemed pretty clear that, although my computer was 95% useable for me, I just didn’t think it would sustain the heavy use of that version of Tradewars which can bring the mightiest of computers to its knees. I knew I had to buy a computer, and I did buy a P4 used late last year, but, well, I don’t know, I just didn’t seem to be highly motivated to get things back up and running. The BBS had been down for 6 months already, and at the end had only a couple of users anyway.

And let’s face it: I was still pretty depressed about my life and frankly just didn’t give a damn. But with new medication things are looking up, I’ve purchased a quad core Win7 box to go with the underpowered P4 (the older BBS computer finally having revealed the problem to have been a dying motherboard), and I’m inspired to get things going again… but at my own pace, gradually, starting over from scratch, making things work right.

Let’s face it: lots of stuff was broken on the old board: dead messaging networks, corrupted file bases, broken IRC server, menus that led nowhere, games that didn’t work quite right, etc.

This time… however long it takes… things will be different. I’m not sure how long it will take. I don’t’ know whether I’m going to put up a bare bones board in tinker mode and add stuff as I go… or restore an old backup and try to repair the broken parts… or wait until every last detail is perfect as it can be before coming online. It may be Synchronet, it might be something else. It might be all web-based except TWGS. I’m researching what to do at this point.