A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

A long long time ago, in this very galaxy, I took a web quiz.

That web quiz was “What is your Pirate Name?” A bunch of other people took said same web quiz. It consisted of a dozen or so cute questions and I came up as “Mad William Flint” and it was all a barrel of yucks.

I started posting on my old blog as MWF (back in the http://radio.weblogs.com/0108194/ days.) and I continued using it as a loose ‘blogonym’ ever since. Of course it was never a serious pseudonym. After all the domain is “mpwilson.” Plus, my name was plastered on the bottom of every page.

Indeed, when gmail was announced “mpwilson@gmail.com” had LONG since been taken, so I did the next most logical thing, never thinking for a moment that it would last me through three apartments and therefore become my primary email address.

So now I’ve got this nice clean slate as the circle turns once more (jesus I’m going to make myself throw-up with talk like that) and it occurred to me about an hour ago, as I was configuring WP 2.5 … What should I do differently?

Lately I’ve been giving out my email address for various and sundry purposes, resulting in the following exchange:

“Well then, you’re all set Mr. Flint”

“Wilson”

“Hmm?”

“It’s Mr. Wilson. The Flint thing is… yeah it’s a long story.”

Or perhaps this one:

“So Michael’s your middle name? I don’t get it.”

“Nah… goofy web quiz. It became my primary email address rather by default.”

“Oh…kay. Let me go powder up while he goes and gets our drinks.”

Why’s she taking her jacket? Isn’t the lady’s room over th… oh… right. “Waiter! Make that a double Talisker, neat. And you can skip the damn appletini, yeah thanks. No no, I’m staying.”

Plus, back in the radio userland days I was the #1 search hit for “Michael Wilson” on google. Yes, me. No really. I’m pretty damn prideful about that even if I’m the only person who ever knew.

Should I actually go through 4100+ historical posts from two other blogs and jam them up there? There’s an awful lot in there. Most of it I’m perhaps more proud of than I strictly ought to be. There’s an awful lot of crap too. There are things I wince at, events in my life I handled with a truly incredible lack of aplomb. But I enjoy going through the archives for the most part. I like reading the old stuff.

Hell, I used to write better than I do today.

So I came up with a couple things:

1. buh-bye MadWilliamFlint. Yeah, enough of that. Sure I’ll use it on a whim, no doubt. But meh. Gotta go. I’ll still have to figure out what to do about the email address, but I have a couple solutions in mind. It’s just going to take a bit of thought to implement them.

2. I’m going to go through the old posts, all umpteen bagillion of them. I’m going to do it very slowly and I’ll figure out some way to push them in with their original dates and times. So you won’t necessarily see it happening (though such activity may show up in a feed, depends on how WP does it.) But over time, things will start to flesh out. Hell, I may even not do it programmatically.

So this’ll all be fun. I’m looking forward to doing some truly unholy things with cgi scripts (don’t worry, all light load stuff) and maybe I’ll use this new site as an excuse to dive in to some js and ajaxy stuff.

As my favorite movie hero of all time said: “Never can tell.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 6:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.