What happened to the blog for the last couple of months? It began with a couple of mistakes on my part, and was rather prolonged by a sinister entity known as Yahoo!Domains.

Okay, I admit it, I completely forgot about the need to renew my domain name. Shouldn’t have been a problem though – yahoo will gladly automatically bill you for it unless you are clever enough to find a way to block them from doing so. But I had a bit of trouble over the summer and had to cancel my cards and get new ones – thus cleverly (or not) avoiding their automatic debit from my account.

Not to worry – they’ll nag you for quite awhile about it: approaching the renewal date, at the date, and for over a month afterwards! But I …. er… switched email addresses and didn’t update my yahoo profile with the new one. Oops. Still, these things are minor details when dealing with the force that is Yahoo! They gladly, eagerly, and with much evil laughter (so I would guess) proceeded to send message after message about it to my yahoo email account – despite my intentionally not listing that email address.
Because, let’s be honest, yahoo addresses are like spam magnets and their spam protection is like trying to cover yourself in a thunderstorm with a piece of tissue paper. I haven’t used or listed that address for anything in several years and yet I am still guaranteed hundreds or thousands of spam messages in the inbox whenever I do happen to take a peek. Sigh.

Well, after finally discovering what the problem was I still faced quite a challenge. The domain name was not up for sale. But I was also no longer able to renew it – too much time had passed. After a quick WHOIS lookup I found that I was still listed for another year…..So what gives?

After much trial and perseverance I was able to get it again. Now if only I had a better method of passing the Great Firewall of China (who in its great wisdom often blocks my blog) so I could post with a bit better frequency…

P.S. Well, it’s been about another month now but it looks like this post might finally make it through. Keep your fingers crossed!