I'm pretty confident that no one has noticed that I've slowly but surely been putting all of the archives back onto this site. Ever since my host deleted everything prior to November of last year, I've been torn as to if I should put everything back up again, which would take a good chunk of time, or just let it all fade away, never to be read again. I decided against leaving it gone.
The first project I undertook was putting all of my photo albums up online again. Thankfully, after using a wonderful album creation utility, JAlbum, I managed to get all of my pictures back up as well as organizing them in a decent fashion. All of my albums are accessable through the link over on your right (or if you need even more guidance, through this link). Thinking that it was going to be a tremendous pain in the ass to sift through all of my photos on my PC and organize them, I dreaded the task. When I finally settled down into my extremely comfortable faux leather desk chair to get to work, I actually found that it wasn't so bad. Having the chance to look back through all of my photos was actually a ton of fun. There were so many things that I'd forgotten I had pictures of and a lot of things that I didn't remember I did. Seeing how I've changed over time was also quite a hoot, even though I now end up wishing I was still in as good of shape as I was during my sophomore and junior years of college.
Once I managed to get all of my photo albums uploaded, the next task was getting all of the blog archives back. This would be a little big of a chore, and will continue to be a chore until I have all of them finally integrated into the site. As it stands now, I only have the archives from the establishment of this site way back in 2002 up until the end of July in 2003 up, but I'm slowly working on putting them all in there when I get a free moment or two at work and when Blogger decides it actually wants to work, which hasn't been very often as of late.
Reading through my archives as I post them is also a blast. I usually have enough time to read one post while another is publishing thanks to Blogger's extremely slow posting speeds. Two things are very apparent as I go through everything I used to write--I was a terrible writer and I was a lot more opinionated than I am now. In comparison to my current writing style, which I know could still use some work, all of my older posts feel as if they penned by a 16 year old who thought he was the king of the world. Some of them are even a little embarassing to read, especially now that I notice how lame most of the stuff I talked about was. The tendency to to talk about "dorky" subjects abounds, which isn't a bad thing necessarily since I still talk about that same type of stuff, but I always would have to make a self-deprecating remark about it. Every time I see a sentence where I refer to my inherant nerdiness or geekiness, I want to pull my hair out in frustration.
The extreme opinionating tone that I take when talking about anything even remotely political or controversial is also quite maddening. I never used to take the time to examine the facts of a situation and would instead simply lash out or take a stance only on my gut feeling. There are actually a couple of posts that I ran across that I'm not reposting because I no longer feel the way I used to and the justifications I used for what I felt back then were paper thin... if that.
I hope that in going through my archives, I'm learning to recognize what it is that I hate in my writing so that I can avoid it in the future, as well as spice up my style a little in order to keep it from getting too stale, as I often see it doing throughout the archives. One other neat thing about having all of these posts back is that I've noticed I'm getting a ton more search engine hits for interesting and sometimes weird word combinations, and that's totally awesome in my book.
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