So, to this WordPress thing…

Blogging!  I love blogging – well, I love the interaction.

Blogging for me started tentatively when teased by sites such as MySpace, Facebook and DeviantArt.  Well, I left those sites long ago for various reasons – actually, pretty much the same reason.  They seemed to have more than their fair share of infantile and argumentative people.  Maybe that’s an unfair assessment on these sites, but the people that kept contacting me on these sites were quite infantile and argumentative.

Blogging became my favourite waste of time when I started my blog on MyOpera.  MyOpera had its share of odd people, but it also had a large amount of really great and interesting people.  The reasons for the types of people who blogged at MyOpera was partly owing to the history of the Opera browser.  There were those dark days when Microsoft Windows had a near total monopoly on the World operating system battlefield and Opera was the only mainstream browser to bother with users of Linux.  There were other factors as well that shaped the Opera community but it is enough to say that MyOpera had a great community going.

And then, MyOpera was no more.  They helped those of us who loved the activity of blogging to migrate our old blogs to WordPress or other suitable platforms.  For posterity, my old MyOpera blog Depressing Music, Dark Literature and Positive Thoughts is preserved here at WordPress.

D’oh! – Ubuntu, the solution to utilising limited hardware

I remember being asked just once about the title of my blog.  The title described me when I started this blog and the title still rings quite true to this day.  I listen to mainly depressing music, I read literature that is sometimes dark in nature but I try to think positively.

Back to this blog.  Many of my current WordPress friends were also MyOpera bloggers.  Like me, I notice that they also seem to have struggled to maintain regular blogging on WordPress.  The old MyOpera blogging community has sort of vanished in the WordPressSphere.  That I’ve posted only nine blog posts in 22 months tells its own story.

So, what for the future of this blog?  A blog on cooking, perhaps?  No, I’m not a great cook.  How about me giving you all some inspirational thoughts and stories?  Hardly a good idea when I’ve struggled to get going at times over the last few years.  How about a blog on my favourite books and albums?  Nah, that could get a little tedious.

No, I don’t need to think of a new theme for this blog.  I just need to blog whilst in the main avoiding reference to all of the bad things that have happened in recent months.

Hopefully, I’ll get to meeting some new online blogging friends at WordPress and become part of post-MyOpera-scene blogging revival.  Will this post-MyOpera-scene be as good as the post-Punk scene…?

A year mostly absent of social media

Hmmm…I’ve been a naughty boy, haven’t I?  All of my internet stalkers must have hated me over the last year as I haven’t left much of an internet trail.

Yes, I’ve logged into my bank account and paid my bills (well, most of the time) but I’ve not done too much on WordPress, Google+ or Twitter.  In the last month I’ve done a little bit on Twitter and in the last couple of weeks a little dash on Google+ because the posts on these two places are only a few words (usually).

So do you want an explanation?  I won’t give too much in that regard; only that there was a big issue that I needed to deal with in the family and I didn’t feel much up to social media.  All of my posts would have been quite depressive – and that’s not the way I wanted to go.  I’m no Robert Smith or David Byrne – The Cure are quite good at songs of depression and Talking Heads are phenomenal with music describing about nervous breakdowns (“The Overload” from the album “Remain In Light” springs to mind).  Anyway, the good news is that I didn’t feel that I needed to listen to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of The Moon” that often.

My life now is…oh, I don’t know.  Remarkable?  Boring?  Insignificant?  Yes, all of those and a few other adjectives.

Financially, I don’t feel like I’m living hand to mouth so much any more.  What I mean by that is that it takes me the whole month to spend my monthly wages at the moment.  This is wonderful progress for me and for that I am thankful to God.

Chicken and Chorizo Bulger with Flat Peas

So, what has changed?  I bought a cookery book that specialises in simple recipes.  I cannot cook at all (remember my MyOpera confession that I set the smoke alarm off while making a salad?) but this book has enabled me to turn out things that are reasonably tasty.  All you do is slice ingredients up and through them into the pot in the right order and – like WOW! – out comes something really nice.  I suppose a quick plug for “One Pot Wonders” by Lindsey Bareham is in order.

My car, oh yes, my car famed throughout the MyOpera years.  My old Honda Civic became quite a feature of my posts for a time.  Unfortunately, it is no longer in my possession.  When I had my MOT in 2013, I was given a list of advisories that filled the page.  I knew from reading them that these repairs all needed to be done within three years at most if I was to continue driving the Honda Civic – and they all looked quite pricey.  Also, the last Labour government had increased the age that a car needed to attain before being exempt from road tax.  No longer would a car get that treat at the twenty five year old mark but now needed to be forty.  The last Labour government had, in effect, billed me over £100 in August 2014.

So, I bought a new car – sorry, I mean a newer car.  I trawled the basement priced used car adverts and telephoned after a cheap looking thing from a nearby dealer.  That car had gone but he said that I might be interested in something else that he had.  Where was he?  Well, down this side alley near the train station where a taxi firm traded from years before.  Their battered old sign was still hanging off the side of the building.  I turned up and was greeted by a locked gate that held back a ferocious barking dog.  A tough guy walked up and asked who I was.  He wasn’t the dealer but he called through to the guy who was.  The dealer was another tough looking dude.  He put on a tee shirt and showed me two well used motors.  I grabbed one of them that had a sunroof (yay! A sun roof!) and he then agreed to take my car the next day as part exchange.  I gave him £50 deposit and then went home and ran a check on the car.  If I was to pay for the car, I wanted to be certain I was not taking on something with outstanding finance or was written off in an accident years ago.  The car was legitimate and so the next day I was driving a green Vauxhall Astra.

Well, that’s enough excitement for today.  I know for sure that this bedtime story will help me sleep well tonight.