 It's been awhile since we've had a bleg. You know how I always hate to ask, and I sincerely thank those of you who make regular monthly donations. Blegging makes me feel like I have greasy ringlets of hair and four teeth and I'm standing on a traffic island holding a sign claiming to be homeless.
Actually I have a perfectly nice home, thank you. I still have a dwindling number of my teeth, with the help of my VA dentist. What little remains of my hair is usually grease-free; there's not enough there to retain it.
I have a PayPal account set up that's supposed to cover hosting, hardware purchases, and occasionally beer or strong drink. I used to have an Amazon account for those who couldn't stand PayPal, but Amazon long ago decided I wasn't a good cause and dumped me. I've looked at other approaches, but none is quite as convenient (for me, anyway) as Paypal, meaning I'm either too dumb or too impatient to navigate the sign-up process.
Hardware isn't desperate at the moment; it's been six months since the server's even needed a restart, which is a record. I still need to keep the cost of a new one set aside for when she does go kaput. I've noticed that talking about how reliable a server is usually causes it to start emitting smoke or something.
Hosting is $110 a month. It used to be cheaper, but it's only gone up by ten bucks in ten years. That's $1320 a year.
I still drink cheap beer, but the price of Jim Beam is getting exorbitant. I'm drinking JD at the moment, but I prefer Beam, which is about $25 a quart.
We're coming up on eighteen years of the Burg. I wrote it from scratch, in three different programming languages, and I've maintained it through three or four databases. The archives are there for anyone who wants to use them, going back to 9-11-01. It's a better site than it was when it started out, and I learned a lot of what I made a career from in writing it and maintaining it. I miss doing the Bloid every night, but my hands aren't quite up to it anymore. Thank you, US Government and Dow Chemical.
I think we've all learned a lot about the enemy from the Burg in the past nearly eighteen years. There's not another site quite like it, at least not that I've found, and I keep (sometimes sporadically) trying to make it better, with the kind help of current and former mods.
Pardon my long-windedness. The subject is, if you've got it, please kick in. I'd be happy to keep at it for the next eighteen years, and then I'll be happy to hand it off to somebody else who'll love it and take care of it (and obsess over it) like I do. But I'm running low on supplies.
Fred 
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