After shutting down my 15-year-old BBS/website/blog, Once Upon An Albatross…, at the end of last year, I put the replacement blog on the bottom of my to-do list and forgot about it. If I didn’t have the time to fiddle around with a personal blog about Silicon Valley and California life, I probably wouldn’t have the time for it later on. The replacement blog came bubbling up on my to-do list this past month, going from a vague idea to something concrete.

Meet the new blog, same as the old blog.

Over the last few years on OUAA, I figured out what I wanted from blogging: being able to comment on the events of the day, point out the absurdities of daily life, and piss into the wind from my soapbox.

With summer blockbusters at the movies, the presidential election for 2016 heating up, and O.J. Simpson back in court, I’m ready to start blogging again.

What’s a bit bucket and why would anyone be kicking it?

The traditional definition of a bit bucket is a place where computer information disappears. A programmer may redirect the output of a program to the NULL device (i.e., /dev/null) to prevent it from appearing on the screen. When data was stored on punched cards during the mainframe era, the bit bucket held the chads that were punched out of the cards.

(This blog has nothing to do with the source code hosting service, Bitbucket, or the related blog post with a similar name. Something the Google search didn’t reveal until after I bought the domain name. If you’re looking for bit bucket as one word, you come to the wrong place.)

As for kicking the bit bucket, it’s more like kicking a habit. After my father died from lung cancer last year, I blogged every other day to relieve the pain I felt. Blogging for the sake of blogging became a bad habit. I’ll blog at least once a week. Maybe more, maybe less.

I hope you enjoy the new blog!