Some Sunny Day
The most recent example of tech failure came two weeks ago, when planet Earth was crippled by yet another Microsoft Meltdown, and another just yesterday. This is the pitiful state of technology in the 21st century.
I started this blog two decades ago, because that's the sort of thing geeks did back then. Like so many things, I did so with the best of intentions, but quickly lost interest. It wasn't that I got swept up by social media - I've always despised that, it was simply that, as time went by, I found technology less and less interesting, and so eventually had nothing to say.
For me, today, technology is basically dead. This is its epitaph, and sadly it's also the epitaph for this blog, and the entire slated.org domain.
The wake-up call was when Bluehost, my (soon to be former) hosting provider, notified me that, for the privilege of hosting an almost entirely unmaintained blog, and one email account, I would have to pay nearly $300 for the year. Needless to say, I politely declined their generous offer, and asked (in an online chat with an Indian call centre operator) if it might be possible for them to migrate me to their cheapest package, to which the answer was basically "no", but I could buy that package then do the migration myself.
Yes, things are very different to the days when Matt Heaton was CEO. Back then you could actually speak to someone on the phone. Someone who spoke English. Someone who respected the fact that I'm a long term customer of nearly two decades, and would trip over themselves to give me good service. Today, Bluehost is administered by glorified bots, sadly like nearly everything else in technology today.
Well, here's the thing, if I have to do all the legwork myself, I might as well switch providers, saving myself a tonne of money in the process. Not to mention the fact that my existing solution is an archaic shared hosting package with limited root access, and now I have the opportunity to move to a VPS with full access, and run basically anything I want ... at a fraction of the cost!
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So, on the 11th of August 2024, the domain slated.org will cease to exist, although (and this may be the most meta thing I've ever done) you may still be able to find at least some of it archived over on the Wayback Machine and archive.is.