Dear Fans, Friends, Fiends and Foes,

I hope this communication reaches you in the best of health.

I am back.  Sort of.  I didn't want you all to think I had pulled a D-Man disappearing stunt and/or had fallen off the face of the Earth, so here is a note about what's up, so far.  Several things have happened at roughly the same time.  As some of you will recall, I have been working on creating my site, herbthiel.com, which had started to make some small progress.  In fact, I loaded the original pages I had written with notepad way back when and started working on my blog, photo album and guest book page software and considering about whether to add a forum when I was left in the unenviable position of having to move computers.  I managed to get everyone's files moved nicely with the use of a crossover cable and networking.  I should say everyone else's.  Yes folks, somewhere between there and here I had a major brain dump and lost my files.  I was able to recover most of them by using "System Restore" but the ones that I wasn't able to save were all the HTML I was working on for herbthiel.com.  The folders and images are there, but none of the text files.  This was very disheartening.

 "How," you say, "How could you just 'lose' all you stuff?"  Well, it wasn't "all" my stuff, just my templates and html files.  Well, perhaps I'm not blisteringly brilliant like some bloggers I could name.  Of course I had not put them on the CD I have labeled, "Back It All Up Herb!"

Then, adding to my woes, I had the cable internet connection disconnected.  Janet had been paying for it, but there is no way in the world I am paying almost sixty bucks a month for the internet.  Plus, in the business section of the Gazette they had an article about people getting disconnected from this very company for overusing their connection!  I guess I thought that you have a high-speed connection because you use the internet a lot, don't you?  It's nice to have, there is no question, and if I had a TV they had a special package where my TV and internet could be combined for about sixty bucks.  I went back to my original dial-up provider although I may consider DSL at some point in the not-so-distant future.  VBS.net is only 9.95 per month and for an additional 3.95 you get an accelerator program that works fairly well.  Here's the strangest thing, live people answer your phone calls in English and fix your problem right away!

This computer that my friend Bro G. made for me from scratch from scraps is nice.  It is a little dumber than Janet's but smarter than the one I had been working on before, whose motherboard passed from this life.  Like that one, it has a 1G processor, 512mb Ram and this is where something else nice happened.  He salvaged what parts he could from my old (old) one, including the 60 gig hard drive with all of my very original files on it.  I am still missing the HTML that I had been recently working on, (yes I understand that I can FTP them back down, but not the ones I was experimenting with) but my other stuff from before is salvaged.  Another good thing is that I now have a full version of Office 2003 including Publisher, which I may cop out and use to make herbthiel.com.

Having the dialup, I have decided to forget about IE 7 or even 6 and have gone to the Mozilla Firefox browser.  What I have done with the tabbed browsing is divided the copious blogs and websites I read every morning into several folders, "blogs to always check no matter what," "more blogs to check no matter what," "mo' blogs yet" and "still mo' blogs."  I just click on the "open all in tabs" button and go fetch a cup of coffee.  With the accelerator it isn't too bad, really.  One of the things it does is "dumbs down" the graphics on non-secure sites so they load a bit quicker and if there is a picture you just have to see in detail, such as the handsome and popular Daveman, you can do it by a right-click.  Not saying IE 7 swiped the idea or anything, but I had never seen them do that until version 7 and it is a lot slower on my machine.  I suppose I should try all the major browsers because they all read a web page slightly differently and I will want to see how my page appears in each.

In case you were wondering about my final decision, I went with godaddy.com for hosting and name registrar.  It was easier for me to use them to do both.  Their prices are good, but sometimes the interface is a bit convoluted as their job is, of course, to sell you things and as always one should remember the Caveat Emptor, "Let the buyer beware."  Not that they tried to rip me off or anything, they didn't, but I didn't need everything that came up that they suggested, and just because they suggested it, doesn't mean I needed to buy it.  For example, I won't need some of the business protection software until later on, so I could remove it from the basket but I kept one of the privacy products.  I liked their total flexibility and besides all that, Danica Patrick, car-racing heroine extraordinaire, is one of their spokespersons.  But I shopped them several times before I decided.

What this all means to you, my faithful friends, is, "I'mmmm baaaaaaccccckkkk..." I hope, as always, to start updating more, but I haven't left.  You are also welcome to go and look around at herbthiel.com even though it is nowhere near completed yet.  See how the guest book works, check out the blog software I got from wordpress.  I haven't used it yet, but I have it on there.

One other thing this means.  I am rapidly running out of excuses for not moving the computer from its temporary site to my desk, which Margaret has vowed in no uncertain terms that I SHALL clean before anything goes on there.  I am in trouble here as longtime readers will recall my previous efforts at rehabilitation.  (If you saw the screen print of my computer desktop, then you know what my desktop looks like.)

Another change I had to deal with was my Bible software.  I have used Quickverse 6.0 Deluxe for a long time, but I didn't have the CDs handy and Bro. G put E-Sword on this machine.  It is very nice, but the interface is quite different from what I am used to.

Please remember, if you go and visit the herbthiel.com site that it is still skeletal.  I really want to find a nice tagboard or tagboard script of some kind that will be similar to what is here.  I like it when people tag me and it does remind me to do something, anything.  Well, anyway, that's what's new.  I did think it was funny the other day, after someone worked so hard to make me stay at Blogdrive that the highlighted profile led to a blog with an entry that linked to the person's new website.

Being in a hurry I am sure that I have made some errors in this entry, but I wanted to get it out so you all wouldn't worry about me.

Happy Easter, too.  The Good Book says, "Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you."