FRIDAY the 13TH HITS HARD!

On Friday, I was talking with a co-worker about how I should have stayed at home in bed that day, and she said, “Its only bad luck if you’re a Knight Templar!”

HA! That’s what she thinks! In fact, though, staying home from work wouldn’t have saved me….

A lot of people who may hit this blog that are around my age probably remember growing up watching Broadcast TV, and if you do, you may also occasionally remember seeing things like THIS:

Well dear readers, I regret to say its my turn to present the “technical difficulties” placard. I blame it on Friday the 13^th, for it was on that date that my main PC on which I write my blog booted-and crashed-for the last time.

Now of course, you don’t think for a second that your humble blogger was too stupid not to back his data up! Not on your life. But, your humble blogger was too stupid to check the integrity on those backups of a regular basis!

So now, over the weekend, I will be in the process of setting up a new replacement computer. No big deal there; I’ve had a PC “on ice” in the basement for just such an occasion and it should take no more than a day of digging up license keys, downloading, installing, and updating to be up and running again.

The data, however, is another story. I’m currently trying to salvage nearly 20 years of photos and video-so we’re talking thousands of files. I believe I will be able to do so, however it looks like its going to take quite a bit longer-and cost quite a bit more money-than it should. Ah, the joys of technology!

There is a positive side to this, however, in that it gives me a chance to make some changes that I’ve been experimenting with on other platforms and wondering about for a while. For instance, I’m going to move away from Firefox, which I’ve been using for years, and start using Brave as my main browser. And, while I may decide to pony up the cash of an old “retail box” copy of M$ office, but before I do that, I think I’m going to start by using OpenOffice-or what’s now called “Libre Office”-instead. I’ve been using this with some success for a while now on other computers in my house, including the one that runs the jumbotron over Drag City that I spreadsheet my races with, and with only a few little annoyances I’ve found it quite satisfactory, so let’s see how it does using it for everything.

All this is actually a preview of a much bigger change that has nothing to do with my computer dying, and that is an upgrade to my WordPress account. You may recall me mentioning in the past that I am almost out of storage on my account and have to do a significant-and rather expensive-upgrade to it in order to keep going, and as part of that I’m planning on trying out a new theme, one that will allow readers to access every post I’ve ever written going all the way back to the beginning (late December 2020), since, currently, the layout I have only allows for a maximum of 300 posts in the menu at the bottom of the page, and I passed 500 posts months ago! While I like the look of the “theme” I’ve chosen, I have gotten tired of the lack of customizability of it. The upgrade I’m being forced to do to gain more space should unlock the ability to add a lot more custom CSS plugins that might let me make changes to the theme, so whether I go with a whole new theme or just modify this one significantly remains to be seen; I’m not a webmaster or XML coder, after all, so I’m going to do whatever is easiest that gives me the results I’m looking for

I expect to make this change shortly before the end of the year or very shortly after the 1^st of 2025, so don’t be too shocked if you hit this blog one day in December or January and it looks very different than what you’ve seen before!

I will continue to post as I am able, but over the next few days you may see a little less material than usual. That’s partly due to the struggle to recover my data, but its also due to my just not acquiring much in the way of slot cars lately. My last major news about slotties was the quartet of early Vibrators I acquired last month. That was a pretty awesome post, but since then I’ve been focused more on the die-cast portion of my collection lately, so my posts here-as I’m sure you’ve noticed-reflect that. To that end, tomorrow’s post will highlight a new Matchbox release that I couldn’t be more excited about, as there’s a “legacy” aspect to this one.

So please stand by, dear readers; we are experiencing technical difficulties, but that’s nothing new when dealing with old cars, old toys, or old computers…sometimes my vintage life bites me in the arse, but I’ll fix it…I always do!