The publisher of this blog has done a poor job keeping it current. His excuse is that he’s been wasting time in social media coffee klatches, hanging out in Facebook, twitter, and Google+. Worse, he claims to have “retired” to Southern California. Evidently this “retirement” takes a lot out of a person and he just hasn’t found the time to post here for the last year and half. So he hired me. You can call me Jonny. I’m here to attend to the crappy technical details and to relieve the publisher of some of the guilt he’s carrying around because he has this fantastic tool that he simply ignores. As tech support, I’ll polish up the look and feel of the site, slide in a little social media integration and rustle up some content since Mr. Paynter can no longer be counted as an active participant. Maybe we can whittle down the absurdly long list of “categories” while we’re at it and bring some focus to the writing here.

It hasn’t been easy making sense of the hodge-podge of hosting services, blogging software, formatting tools and plain old garbage that Mr. Paynter surrounded himself with back in the days when he was actively blogging. This workstation he’s provided for me is absurdly over-configured. One needs no more than an internet connection, an FTP client, a browser and a simple editor (vi would suffice). I think the Mona Lisa was painted with less. I’m sitting in front of two monitors–one a wide screen–wired into a so-called “Personal Computer” with more processing power and data storage than was available to the entire NASA enterprise when they put those guys on the moon. A browser? There are four different flavors of browser on this machine. Thankfully none of them is Safari. The FTP client points at two different hosting services and a half dozen domains on those services. Sadly, this blog’s domain is hosted by GoDaddy. I’ve spoken with Mr. Paynter about how politically incorrect that is, not to mention confusing; but years ago he bought into the GoDaddy thing before he realized the implications of doing business with Bob Parsons, a sexist and an elephant killer of the first water. I may not be able to influence him to change web hosts at this late date.

Many years ago, when I had just matriculated at what was then called Banaras Hindu University (now IIT, Varanasi), the bloggers were climbing aboard the WordPress bandwagon. Mr. Paynter, whose blogs seem to have been contrived on every piece of software ever written, of course hopped on this bandwagon, and after a year or two he adopted a theme called “Cutline” by Chris Pearson. Cutline was clean and simple and it actually worked. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Paynter seems to have written Mr. Pearson a check for a new theme called Thesis. It was about this time that Mr. Paynter’s writing ended and his time began to be taken up by a futile attempt to understand the ins and outs of Mr. Pearson’s newer software.

Now I have graduated from IIT, I have my green card, and I am working for Mr. Paynter. Perhaps some day soon this blog will begin to look more respectable and less like a hog wallow.