In addition to this blog, I have a ‘forum‘ which I use as a blog for cycling topics, and another cycling forum, ‘acf’, which is long since defunct but still online as a repository of zombie threads and a useful source of killed time whenever I’m running low. There’s a story of it here, but briefly, it was fun until it wasn’t. Then it became fun again after it stopped being a forum.
Last night was a banner day in acf history. With the ancient software an increasing security risk, it was finally time to update it. Given the plethora of modifications I’d had done over the years – it’s amazing how much work is necessary to keep something simple – this always promised to be a headache. So I contacted my web guy.
He lives in the Pacific Northwest, which is a continent away from acf’s server in the American South, itself an ocean’s breadth from me. He’d be sitting down at his computer as I was due for bedtime. Naturally, I shifted my personal time zone to suit his working hours, which proved to be quite as elastic as mine.
We started with the colour. Fond as I was with what I had come to think of as acf blue, I now wanted something completely different from my other ‘forum’, itself a hue of the world’s favourite. The absence of all colour seemed the way to go, so I chose bitchin’ black. Far (for that is my web guy’s very appropriate name) then threw a totally unexpected squiggle at me; found art to which he’d matched a font. I didn’t get it the first time I saw it, but when the loveliness of the segue struck me, it was like manifest destiny. It’s also like a signature, in that it may not be immediately intelligible, but it’s unique.
Far had hit one out of the park.
Next came the detail work of throwing out the kitchen sink the Simple Machines Folk have built into their software, while keeping my modified version of it on a better footing for future upgrades. It pretty much took all night, with breaks zonked out on the couch counting sheep.
We didn’t wrap things up until late morning for me, middle of the night for Far. When I beheld the wonder he had wrought I nearly wept. With tiredness, it’s true. I know, it’s just a forum (which isn’t a forum). It’s also a canvas for painting when I’ve already got a few of those. It’s a social media construct whose only success has been my late night banter which straddled the globe. It’s a squiggle on the inky night.