Old Data

Today I finished going through all of the posts I imported from LiveJournal and fixed up all of the media. I also removed all of the duplicate media that got imported as well…

It turns out LJ makes several sizes of attached media just like WordPress does, but unlike WordPress LJ didn’t dynamically craft the HTML for the target display back in the old days. So old posts on LJ had links in the HTML to all of the media sizes, which meant my scraper dutifully pulled all of the sizes and stuck them in WordPress’ media directory.

An easy fix really, it just took some time to clean up. And while I was at it I sequentially redid all of the old posts in WordPress’ block format versus raw imported code.

I’m still missing a lot of my personal ancient history from when I shut down my Google account due to the Gawker screw up in 2010…

I set up my gmail account in late 2004, and as people tend to do I wound up doing everything through various Google services – and this eventually included all of my photos and whatnot. Now, while I did back up everything that was in Google at the time, that DVD backup was promptly lost in the move that happened six months later…

In an ironic twist of fate, much of that backup also existed in my DropBox at the time, but DropBox wants me to change the password and will only send the link to my gmail account I had at the time… And being as Google simply won’t reactivate or reissue my old email address, that old data is just beyond my grasp.

Sometimes technology is stupid.

I’ve tried a couple of times to convince DropBox that I really am that guy. I mean, I have the same email ‘name’ at mac.com, which existed for several years before gmail existed – and I even own a domain with that name that traces back to the mid 90’s… I can even point out the various cameras used to take the photos that are in that DropBox! But, nope – the robot cares not for my pleas.

Oh well, such is life here in the future.

Listening to "We Never Got to Say Goodbye" by New Arcades