I'm supposed to write something here today. I'm supposed to have written many things here over the last few weeks. Maybe it was the poetic justice involved with a turbo and exhaust manifold transplant into the pickup - but I can't write about that. Or maybe I could write about how families who have come to hate each other over generations - all over disputes regarding land that they live on but don't own. But I can't write about that. Maybe I could write about the betrayal of trust by someone who was so tantalizingly close But I can't write about that. Or maybe I could write about how a visit to an Aunt helped me put another nail in the casket of my own father's expectations of me. That would require way too much time to write.

Or I could write about how various members of a family admit the dysfunction of their family but, somehow, each one of them thinks that they are the 'normal' one. But I can't write about that because I, too, am guilty. Or maybe I could write about the woman in the wheelchair who burned her fingers while taking a shot with me. But I won't write about her, either.

Maybe I could write about the young women I see around and the strangeness of being that comes with the knowledge that my nieces are older... and even wiser... than them. But I won't write about that.

Maybe I could write about how much time research awaits serendipity. But I won't write about that.

Life, you see, is pretty boring when you put the filters on.

As I mentioned before, I'm rethinking the KnowProSE.com site. To do that, I have had to analyze what I was doing with it for the last 9 years and what my motivations were. I'm also trying to figure out what the new motivations are.

The last 9 years were an exploration that started a little before KnowProSE.com. I'd already bought the domain for a company I was starting in Florida. And it followed me around for a while - 'Knowledge Professional, Software Engineer'. KnowProSE. And then I started branching out whenever something interested me - and so the taxonomy became as focused as some accuse my life of being. It's not my fault that some have focal baths while I have focal showers. I get to connect the water however I wish.

So here I am, late at night, considering the many twists and turns. Having just read Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success, there is a bit of a reaffirmation of the way I approach subjects. I don't want to lose that. And I realize, too, that I can't keep doing that on one site. On one blog. It just becomes... unmanageable. And that is something I learned - something, perhaps, others avoided by conforming to the wisdom of the day as preached by the bloggers-for-bloggers.

But I got to learn exactly why it doesn't work whereas others just went with the conventional wisdom. I have an advantage - hard won, but an advantage nonetheless.

Yesterday, I got an email from a friend who pointed me at my flagship site - KnowProSE.com. The site was - and presently is - down. So I emailed the host to find out that they had done a database (MySQL) update on December 13th and that their only backup was from December 14th. Given the fact that my life has taken some sharp twists and turns, I haven't been doing my own backups... as I should have been. The host did provide me with a backup from earlier this year, and I started working on it last night. I also stopped working on it last night.

So while what the host did seems very stupid, I have to admit fault. A site is supposed to be bigger than the host. And while KnowProSE.com represented 9 years of my writing at this point, I couldn't really explain why I immediately felt relieved. And here I am, feeling relieved.

When I first started writing in my teens, I had a habit of writing and then burning what I wrote. The process of writing was always more important to me than the result. Inadvertently, I've done it again.

The truth is that KnowProSE.com had become a massive juggernaut developed as I first set out using content management systems (Drupal). It had a lot of my ideas and thoughts as well as ideas and thoughts of other people. Truth be told, it was just a mess to manage and upgrade because of the fact that it wasn't focused on anything; it was focused on everything. To move it forward in any direction would have required a lot of work on my part - work that required time that I simply haven't had between dealing with land, business and other issues.

There's a familiar story about a mouse hitting a button, maybe red, to get dosed with cocaine. It does so, consistently, in preference to food and sex.

I prefer to think of the button as being a mouse button. And instead of cocaine, there's the Internet. Some mice have a simple mouse manufactured by an elitist fruit company, but the vast majority of mice have a Swiss knife of a mouse. It's got a minimum of 3 buttons, and one of them scrolls content up and down on a receptacle that, no matter how large, always seems too small. In fact, if there was a way to crawl into the receptacle I imagine the problem with these mice would be short-lived.

But that's the Internet. Publishers are driven through by the number of clicks their content gets and - sometimes - even the quality of the clicks if that makes any sense. Thus, publishers typically cut their content into smaller pieces so that the mice have to click through more links to get their doses of content. Each click is some revenue for the publisher. Click. Click. Click. And the majority of the mice, even hearing the urban legend of how they are just revenue streams for publishers, continue to click no matter the quality or quantity of the content. Click. Click. Click.