Where did they go?

Well, I decided to be inspired by one of the Blogs I follow -- "The Retirement Bubble" and accept the fact that I just am not going to be a daily blogger. So, I headed to my blog and "ZAP", my last blog was no longer there. In fact, my stat counter for visits (which I watch not go up very fast ) went backwards from 184 to 121.

I'm sure that things of this nature happen to you, also. What can the reason be?

Well, first, of course, there is the jello-like consistency of memory. I could have just imagined that I posted a blog entry last month. People look at memory as the chronicle of the past but it just doesn't really work that way. If you think about doing something enough times, with enough detail, it will blur the boundary between "memory" and "dream". Given an amount of elapsed time, that boundary may easily disappear. I know people who have very fixed "world views" and you can tell them "yes" to a question and, because they just "knew" you were going to say "no", they will HEAR "no" and remember "no". This is a bit more severe of a split between "memory" and "dream". The bottom line is -- one cannot really rely on memory

But, do I think that is what happened? No. Of course it could be vanity -- "other people may not remember correctly but I certainly do". No, the main reason I don't think that was the case is because of the stat number. Everyone has certain areas where their memory is well exercised and more reliable. My stepdaughter can remember what someone wore for a given date within the past few months and practically forever about what SHE was wearing. Other things aren't so important to her and she just doesn't remember. For me, it is numbers. I can visualize that "184" in the stats area and I'm pretty sure it isn't a false memory.

There are some aspects to irregular posting that are certainly suspect. For example, some of the formatting aspects of this blog seem to be strange to me -- but, for that, I will just blame my memory and not doing this blog often enough.

Assuming that I'm not crazy and my memory is not totally faulty, where did the blog go? Two possible avenues seem to rise to the surface. One, a system crashed and the disk got backed up (which, for Google, does seem a bit scary to think that backups are unreliable). Two, I didn't do something correctly to commit the blog into permanent status.

Actually, there is a third possibility but paranoia just isn't my thing. "Someone" could have removed it. Since the blog was concerned with firmware and quality control (and Toyota) I guess that there is a little weight to that but I don't really believe it.

At any rate, my last blog vanished and I'll have to think about it a bit to start over the chain. The last blog was on embedded software (firmware) and quality control. The next was going to be about embedded software on cars, unit testing and system testing -- and the difficulties of fully system testing real-time software for interconnecting modules (groups of software). And the next was going to be quality control and testing in general.

However, since the first of the series has vanished I guess I'll think it all out again.

Google, if you're listening -- maybe YOU can find out what happened to my last blog .