Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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The Past Comes Back to Haunt Us

If you’ve been paying attention to this blog (yeah, you, both of you), you’ll notice that the archives now go all the way back to January of 2002. That’s when I started the site on topcities some time back. I moved some of the “journal” posts I had from there into blogger, using a very detailed process I shall refer to as “manual copy-and-paste and editing of links”. I still had some backup copies of most of the old site around, and archive.org was a big help. There wasn’t much editing actually, I just went through most of the links and marked those which were broken. I didn’t transfer (yet) any posts which needed additional files to exist on my own server, those are a bit more troublesome, so later. All in all, the content of the posts are presented as they are, or were, typos and all, making these archives a genuine representation of my frame of mind circa 2002.

The purpose of this exercise is of course for posterity. Putting all these posts in one place makes it easy for me to export them in some method in the future. (And even if blogger goes down for some reason, these posts are now also hosted on my fateback account, and you know there’s safety in redundancy.) So, past memories safely preserved.

After all, that’s what a journal should be about right? Something that lets you look back into the past, to see what B*S you were trying to put out back then. Online journals are roughly ten thousand times more exciting than private ones; if you’re honest enough (i.e., you don’t edit out any embarassing stuff from old posts), there’s always the tendency for something from the past to come back and bite you in the ass.

As an example, in the last post I made a comment about how I may have pissed my dentist off. It’s a funny story actually. I wanted to post, but was in too much tooth-pain to think clearly; so after the tooth-pain cleared, I decided to post about it. (Note to future self: even if you move to a different server, keep the fateback account, so these permalinks would still actually work.) About a week after that, I sent an email to my dentist, (wow, I exchange email with my dentist, I’m like, so cutting edge, for 1999) and she read the blog entry. She mailed me back saying the post “knocked her off her chair”, or something. I emailed back, saying it was just an exaggeration, hoping I didn’t piss her off. She hasn’t responded yet though (and I haven’t needed any dentist-time lately), so I conclude that there’s a distinct possibility I may actually have pissed her off. I’ll found out when I need to get this impacted molar removed, I suppose.

So, anyway, yeah. Coming back to bite you in the ass. And for this reason, I’m hesitant to let anyone at work know about this blog. (At least one person at work knows it exists, but does not know the location) My long-term memory is a bit stupid, I may have inadvertently said something here that may be bad for me professionally, I’m not really sure. And of course I have no idea how a certain someone would react to me publishing on the internet my feelings about her.

What am I saying? Am I going to be more circumspect in the future, and avoid anything that may get me in trouble? Hell, no. Although I did breifly consider taking down the Unrequited post, I’m pretty sure I should stand for what I’ve written. No matter how bad, sappy, or stupid it was, it’s my work, I should just take it for what it is. Hence bringing back the old posts.

Hmm… I really only wanted to post that I was bringing back the old posts. I talk a lot.

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