Tuesday, May 7, 2013

There are three cardinal sins that could sunder our weekly blog covenant, and I’ve committed two of them in just under a week, likely a new record. The first sin is to write nothing. That was Thursday, basically. The second sin is to miss an annual hosting payment. This would be the equivalent of getting your utilities shut down, and it has yet to happen, fortunately. And finally, the third sin is to forget about domain name renewal, which is kind of like getting evicted. This happened from Friday until tonight, apparently, and I’m aghast at the mistake.

Indeed, you may have experienced it firsthand, for which I apologize. Sometimes, when you misspell a domain name in your address bar, you are whisked away to a boring page with a mess of links and a stock photo of some fresh-faced chick. This is precisely what happened when I went to secondhandrants.com a few hours ago, only it wasn’t a misspelling. There were links to secondhand hats, secondhand farm equipment, secondhand books, and other gently used merchandise. Our decade-long legacy had been cast into the forgotten corners of the Internet.

But we’re back in business now, after a payment of $11.59 and a frantic repointing of nameservers. I blame it on my recent exercise. I’ve been mulling over the best way to deliver this topic when it comes up in normal conversation, and initial tests for my current punchline have been promising. When you walk into a Planet Fitness or a GNC and take in the marketing materials, the wording is invariably cheery and hopeful–some bullshit about a “new you” or other such contrivances. No! No. I reject this school of copy. I’ve been exercising to slow the decay of my body. Nothing more, nothing less.