Circus music, please!

How ironic. I was up last night thinking about weird stuff (totally unrelated to computers), so I decided to do something I had been considering for some time now, which was to start a new blog. There have been a number of occasions when I wanted to write about things unrelated to computers, yet refrained from doing so under the auspices of the Computer Circus (despite the many existing unrelated entries). And with all the thoughts buzzing through my head last night, I decided it was time to get up - right then and there - and start a new blog.

Enter Blogger. I logged in and began the process of creating a new blog. First, I had to figure out what to call it. After a few moments of contemplation and a few rejected titles, I settled on Haphazard Musings. I figured that would pretty much cover the gamut of subject matter that may eventually find its way in there.

So then came the process of finding an available blogspot URL. I tried a few different names, but kept running into issues - mainly with the secret "word" (i.e. jumbled letters) that you had to type in from the graphic display as a means of indicating that I was actually a human creating this thing, and not a machine. But I guess the machine couldn't handle that. Between telling me I entered the letters incorrectly and my blogspot URL unavailability, I suddenly found myself staring at a page that was telling me that Blogger was temporarily down for scheduled maintenance, from 4:30-5:30 pm Pacific Time. Considering it was about 1:00 in the morning, I took this with a grain of salt.

However, I was subsequently unable to complete the creation of my new blog. I was a bit annoyed, because I had seen this downtime message a lot over the past two days, and never between 4:30 and 5:30 pm. So I assumed Blogger must be having trouble. And my suspicions were confirmed when I logged out and tried to log back in. This time, I simply got an error page. Then I tried to go to the Blogger home page and got the same error page.

So, I decided to write my first entry for my new blog, offline. I wrote for about an hour and decided to check Blogger again. Still no luck. I tried different computers and different browsers just to make sure it wasn't some cookie confusion or something on my end, but to avail. Blogger was down.

But I was able to visit other blogs (including my own) and post comments to them, so at least I was happy that that functionality was still up. I read a little, posted a little, then went to bed and finally got some sleep. I woke up today and was finally able to log into Blogger...and I found my new blog in my list! This was very odd. But, no surprise, it wasn't working. I finally decided to make the URL the same as the blog title, haphazardmusings.blogspot.com. I quickly selected a template (rather than drudging up one of my own), posted my first entry (and fugding the time to make it reflect the time of the writing), and I was done.

New blog up and running!

This means this particular blog - the Computer Circus - will now remain specific to computer and computing issues, and you can visit my Haphazard Musings corner to get to the more human-readable stuff. Some of it still might not be very consumable, but some of it will undoubtedly be light and silly, or even something serious that people can relate to. It will be interesting to see what transpires.

Whoa! Hey! Did you see that Pac-Man running across the screen?