On the last possible day… it appears that all posts have moved, that any duplicates can and will be deleted, and that email sent this morning might not have gotten through. Oh well; at least everything’s here. Again, things will look funny due to different text encoding, but deal.

I got a sudden note that my web host is shutting down at the end of this month. Therefore, there will be some weirdness with the site as I move to a new host. Expect the photo galleries to finally migrate to Flickr, for instance.

Update: we’re now at WordPress.com, more or less, after wrestling with numerous export and import scripts (you’d think WordPress could handle this simply, no?). Some posts are still missing, the lack of Textile formatting here makes some posts look strange, and I’ve trashed some of the old static content, but most importantly everything’s safely backed up. Might also give TextPattern a try.

Busy month, notably owing to a full winter travel schedule. (Chicago’s a nice place to leave in the winter.) Now, I’m almost sure that my hard disk has crashed — thus wiping out most of the photos from the past few weeks, too, at least since the last backup. Oh well.

Among the photos to be posted earlier which will likely never make it: one of the “multimodal signs”:http://www.commuterpage.com/carshare.htm marking Zipcar spaces in Portland. Nice to know it’s not just a PDX thing, though.

Updating the “web version”:https://westnorth.com/guide will take another little bout of enthusiasm, but in the meantime you can download a PDF of a fully revised “Chicago City Guide”:https://westnorth.com/guide/cityguide06-web.pdf (2.9 MB), created for “Rail~Volution 2006”:http://railvolution.com.

Due to workload, the very light blogging schedule will continue until mid-June or so. Keep checking for new photos, though, and watch for live blogging from the floor of “CNU XIV”:http://www.cnuxiv.org in Providence — resting place of “General Burnside”:http://www.quahog.org/attractions/index.php?id=81, whose legendary facial hair gave us the Spoonerism of “sideburns.” I’ll grow mine out for the occasion.

Spent time hacking at the stylesheets. The index page looks fine in Firefox, different but okay in Safari; interior pages need work. It’s not a high priority, though.

Rather humbling to see just how small a map describing most of my travels ends up.

I finally got around to posting the Chicago City Guide that our committee wrote for CNU XII last year. It’s an entertaining, quick overview of the city and its neighborhoods, even without the great photography and maps that we originally had. (I need to find where those files went; when I do, I’ll add them to the guide.)

Devin posted photos from our Team Biking Vikings adventure at Saturday’s Explorago sustainable scavenger hunt, presented by the Foresight Design Institute. Still no word on whether we won, but I’ll certainly never forget getting towed in a wheelchair, at top speed, down the middle of Lake Street, in a thunderstorm.

Minor but important changes here: the blogroll is back, although lacking in some refinements and still missing many of the old internal links. In time…

The archive now looks more extensive because it is now officially complete: almost four years of blogging! After two hours of wrenching with code, I managed to import almost 200 blog entries from the dim mists of antiquity, pre-MT (i.e., 2001-2003). Didn’t have categories or titles back then, so most of them (except ones I’ve revisited) lack both — but they’re now searchable, in the calendar archive, and filed under the category “musty stacks.” Due to odd line break behavior, I’ve noticed a few broken links; if you see one, leave a comment and I’ll fix it.

Sorry for the downtime (really, only about an hour or two) over the past day. I’ve been ironing out the kinks, and re-imported from Movable Type thrice in order to fix some links and some funky text formatting behavior. (I knew that my penchant for em dashes would get to me one day, but “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/index.html sees double dashes without spaces as strikethrough.)

The entire move has been planned for a while, but mostly has to do with dropping Apple’s $100/year .Mac service, which I had been using for web storage and the email account. However, three primary email boxes and two web hosts became too much to juggle, so now I’m down to two boxes and one host.

Bonus feature: comments are back! Plus a new, temporary look while I rebuild the templates.

This is not really turning into a cameraphone photoblog, but Flickr’s upload-by-email makes it ridiculously easy to send posts from, oh, a street corner or a nightclub or anywhere. I’m pondering switching to WordPress later this summer, which supports blog-by-email.