My blog turned two last weekend!  I probably should have posted this on it’s birthday, but I was too busy being a delinquent mother and gambling away in Atlantic City.

Last year, I did a post about things I learned in my first year of blogging.  This year, I learned one huge thing and that is I am cursed.

Some things that have happened to me in the past year:

I lost all my non-published content.  I work on four computers.   One is my PC at home, my preferred computer to work on.   One is my work computer.   One is my netbook that goes everywhere with me because it is small, but it also sucks and is frozen all the time.  The fourth is my actual laptop, which works wonderfully but is too big to travel with.

Going back and forth between all these computers should not be a problem.  But for me, it is.  Why?  Because the internet will not work on my home PC.  That leads to this:

Everyone:  If your wifi works in your apartment, you should be able to connect a cable from the modem into your PC

Me: Yes, I know.  I used to do this.  But one night I defragmented my computer and for some reason, it lost a lot of abilities, including going online.  I also lost the ability to choose 256 colors, or change my theme, and everything now defaults to Times New Roman, which I hate.

Everyone: But if the wifi works, the internet should work

Me: It does, but the COMPUTER IS BROKEN.

Everyone: Maybe you just need a new cable

Me: (smashes head into keyboard)

So I would do tons of work on my PC and save it onto a flash drive and bring it with me that way.  Then one day, my flash drive vanished out of my bag.  I don’t have any idea where it went.  I tore up my apartment, it is not there.  I had nothing saved on the actual computer (YES I KNOW) so tons of blog posts I never uploaded to the internet are gone.

Everyone: You should save stuff to a cloud

Me: I know, but my PC won’t connect to the internet

Everyone: If you can get wifi, your PC should connect

Me: GAH MAKE IT STOP

I managed to fix my computer about a month ago.  This took me five hours.  My internet provider was of no help.  They kept telling me to call Dell.  Dell told me that my warranty ended seven years ago and that I could pay for service…no.   So now I do have internet functioning on it, I do use the cloud.   I just cannot do other things on my PC like post on Twitter or use Hootsuite because the security patch was erased when I defragmented and the new one will not load.   I tried every single thing Google told me to do.  I can’t do it anymore.  I just can’t.

I lost every single backlink and Facebook like on my blog.  Sigh.  I wanted to make the URLs of my posts, post without the date automatically in them.  So I switched to this.  One day before leaving for Las Vegas.  Then I realized that this changed every URL on my blog (duh) and that any link to my blog, was now dead.  This includes not only every Twitter post, every Facebook post, every shared URL by someone else, every blog I have ever posted on that allows you to do “last post by…”, every link in my own blog, on the “Where I’ve Been” pages, the Las Vegas Trip Reports section (which I had just heavily promoted using my current Vegas trip as the bait) and finally, every single Facebook like on every post I have ever made.   Do you have any idea how depressing it is to click on a post and see the bottom, the little Facebook like button and “0” next to it?   There used to be triple digits there!

Since I was leaving for Las Vegas, and since I travel with an always frozen netbook, this was not something I could deal with.  So I did not deal with it.  It was killing me to see people retweet old tweets, with links that were now dead.  I have since redone my Twitter account and have scheduled the bulk of my blog up so that people searching for certain hashtags will see the newer tweets, with links that actually work.

The last technological meltdown that I am not yet dealing with, is that I am missing some photos from China.  See this beautiful photo of Tibet?

I saved it from my Facebook page.  Which I had to do because I cannot find it on a computer.  Which means that at some point between uploading it to Facebook, and today, it has gone missing off a computer.  Is it possible that it was saved ONLY on a flashdrive?  Of course it is.  Does that mean that there may be tons more photos from this adventure missing?  OF COURSE it does.  I did not have internet during a large part of my trip to Mount Everest.  Thereby, I had no cloud.  It is entirely possible I saved the pictures on a disk.  That is now gone.

The final straw for me was my netbook.   It kept whining “wah, Microsoft update, wah install now, wah pay attention to me” so I finally installed it.  Do you know what happened next?  I can no longer open Word.  This obviously happened during a trip to Las Vegas where I had been saving daily trip reports in Word.  I can (and did) open them in notepad on another computer.  But while this one was a simple solve, it was the final straw and I found myself hating my blog.

All of these things are my fault and I have solved all my problems.   I fixed the internet on my PC, I upload to the cloud regularly, I am purchasing a brand new Mac Air so I no longer use that shitty netbook.  I am not looking for advice.  I am just venting my frustration.

What is up next for year three?   Well I am going to rewrite and post all the China posts I never got up on my blog.  I have already started working on it.

I am going to GET OVER IT and stop sitting on my couch completely defeated by technology.  I am going to get up and kick technology’s ass back.  I have had enough of you screwing with me, now I am here to knock you the fuck out of my way.  BRING ME MY BLOG JEEVES.

I am also going to go back to China so I will have tons of brand new content, full of gorgeous pictures (that will also be saved in my cloud.  I promise.)