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I hate technology. Really. I work with it every day, but I feel about it the same way that sanitation workers feel about their medium (or the way I HOPE they feel about it). I use technology when I have to, to do what I want to do. But I hate it. And it knows it and it hates me back. Take for example the weekend's outage on this blog.

It's a tough life being a consultant. Here is a peek behind the scenes at the IT Skeptic working on IT governance research in one of the corporate breakout areas on the Two Hills headquarters campus:

Thankyou to everyone who voted for me in the ComputerWeekly blog awards: I came runner up! Not bad for an un-certified ex-vendor living 12,000 miles away in a tiny village in a tiny country - the internet is just awesome. Congratulations to Alim Ozcan on winning the category.

The malls are pumping out carols-muzak, my social diary is filling, the spring winds are howling through Pukerua Bay, a pile of blank greeting cards stares accusingly at me, my son drops hints about electric guitars. Yup, Christmas is coming. Buy something to support the IT Skeptic.

Dear users,
the email subscription engine on this site has caused much grief over the years. Effrective 31st November we'll be turning it off unless there is much protest from the users - you guys. Anybody desperately need it? The RSS feeds provide an alternate mechanism for new content and/or comments
this won't affect newsletters
Cheers
Skep

Back in February I said (in response to that truly stupid book Cult of the Amateur) "the average blog will have about four readers". It is coming true.

I've issued plenty of warnings about the recession, about how it may well be gathering momentum rather than all over. And I am still very cautious. But perhaps I've been too cautious. In fact maybe this recession has got me into a funk. I've found myself saying no to much interesting stuff. The main reason for adopting this lifestyle was life's fickle nature: I need to get back to a bit more carpe diem - sieze the day.

After three years of this blog there's someone I should thank: the folk at WestHost who have kept it running almost without a hitch all that time. I've run this blog on virtual servers and real ones, all hosted in Utah by the nice WestHost folk. The service has been impeccable, from real live humans who are invariably polite, patient, responsive and helpful. There are slightly cheaper deals out there but not much and with a lot more unhappy customers on the forums: I think WestHost is a great deal. We've had a couple of glitches over the the years, only one of which was their fault as we moved from one server to another and the domain didn't come along. They jumped to fix them both times. The rest of the time it has chugged quietly away, the technology upgrading from time to time, backups backing up and servers serving. I'm a very happy customer.

Congratulations to the IT Skeptic on three years of blogging. I've been invited to write a few words on this occasion.