Moving

Spring arrives, and with it renewal, nature’s renewal. People start getting ready for this season, which in Chile coincides with the national holidays. A time of ramadas (the open-air fiesta stalls), of flowers, folk songs, of memories, some of them very hard ones. But it seems everything ends up fixed with a glass of chicha, or of good red wine.

In this season of change it occurred to me to change hosts, servers, and I took the chance to move this blog to a new home. That is not all I had to migrate: I also helped a friend move his system, which was hosted on my old server, somewhere else.

Migrating systems is always complicated. Almost anything can go wrong, from forgetting to back up some file to the new platform having a different version of your runtime environments.

That is why planning matters. As Ike Eisenhower used to say:

I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

And that is what happens. You plan, you try to imagine every possible situation, because things do not happen the way you had planned. For example, many of you who subscribe to this blog by email, through the RSS feed provided by FeedBurner, received two unexpected updates. To everyone affected by this, a thousand apologies.

But the important thing is that we are still on the air, in a new home. Let’s see what this new place has in store for us.