As a software developer that gets loaned out to other companies, I tend to have quite a few “first day on the job” days. Today was one of them, joining a team working hard to get a new bio-lab robot on the market.

As is typical with joining a new project, I spent the entire first day trying to figure out why nearly nothing in the README actually worked.

Computers are the worst.

I used to be a prolific blogger, back in the very early days of the form. Had a few things “go viral” before that was a thing, meaning they were seen and talked about by dozens of people, but I was comfortably C-list in that small world.

As my online time got eaten up by other things, like farming and starting a family, my posts became shorter and less frequent and eventually just … stopped. Instead of using my own space to keep my words, I unconsciously switched over almost exclusively to a hot new microblogging platform started by some podcasting tooling developers called Twttr.

Twitter’s very short character limit made it ideal for the short bits I was writing anyway, and it was easy to write them more often. This only increased the ephemeral quality of them and I didn’t even notice really that I was just creating a gap in my once exhaustively documented life. I’ve got all my tweets downloaded and stored away, but they’re not something I can really go back and read. Those years are essentially lost to me.

But now an egomaniacal billionaire troll has taken over and is systematically destroying Twitter and that has shocked me awake. It’s well past time to start owning my words again and, more importantly, treating them like they matter and kept and displayed and shared.

So, here’s Kestrel’s Nest back from the dead.

I’m using Hugo to power it, displayed using the m10c theme. I might charge all that, and this is certainly a rough draft, but it’s a good place to start.

For a laugh, I used a page from February 2001 from my old blog here as a placeholder. I thought about making this style match that exactly, but if I go that route I’ll do it another day. It’s here if you want to have a laugh too.

I’ve come out the other side. Amazingly enough, I only had to reinstall two applications: my virus scanner and web browser. All my email survived. And, my first impressions are great. I like Windows 2000. I am using Stardock’s wonderful Object Desktop, so my GUI doesn’t even look like Windows to begin with, and changing to W2000 didn’t affect me there at all. If you picked up my laptop right now, you would think I was using Apple’s OS X.

Today I migrate my laptop from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 Professional. I’m scared.