My folks from Germany arrived at Governors Island 300 years ago in June. The Brits put them on the island because the 2,500 Palatines would have burdened the city. New York City had only 5,000 residents at the time.

By October 1710 they were encamped at Germantown to manufacture ship stores for the British crown. The tar making didn't work out at all and the clan broke their indenture agreements and moved twice, ultimately settling in what is now Herkimer County, NY. (The approximate period and location depicted in "Drums Along the Mohawk.")

I like the tradition, but don't feel anything like pride of aristocracy--I'm just proud to have blood that's been American for a long long time--since Isaac Newton's time, think of that. It's not hoity-toity in the least; they were farmers and carpenters, and militia members as early as the French and Indian war. They were scrappy and sort of assholes. One story about the Mohawk years from Philip Otterness' Becoming German tells of a gang of Palatine women riding a tax collector out of town on a rail and peeing on him. Very early tea partiers. A namesake of my line's patriarch had no use for Tories.

My Bellinger line, as far as my dad has been able to figure out: me > Richard > Vernon > Ellis > Adam > Phillip > Adam > Philip > Philip (Known as Lips!) > Johannes. My oldest son is called Adam and my last name is his middle name.

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 7/6/2010; 8:43:28 PM.   .

I'm going to repost the last post or two from my regular personal blog just to get the hang of embedding things and formatting and links.

 7/6/2010; 8:38:56 PM.   .

I fumbled around a little until I realized that in addition to specifying my short name in Scripting 2 prefs, I also had to register the blog in my existing Disqus account and create the short name for it.

 7/6/2010; 8:35:34 PM.   .

Gosh, it's easy to write with this thing. Sentences just fall out.

 7/6/2010; 8:21:13 PM.   .

I'm thinking of reporting on an after-hours project to keep myself motivated.

Going public is a great way to keep promises to yourself.

It's like two things I can think of:

- A message board I started in 1997 for grad students having trouble finishing their theses and dissertations. I handed off management of the site years ago, but it's still going and students are still "pacting." That's what they call it when someone starts a thread saying something like "I'm going to write three pages a day for the next five days and organize my notes from such and such a survey. Anybody in?" Then others will say what they're going to do. It's quite inspiring.

- A wedding ceremony. You promise all kinds of things in front of most everybody you know.

How do you do unordered lists?

 7/6/2010; 8:15:55 PM.   .

I tried nuking the dupe from the backup directory.

I think I confused myself by trying to hand-copy backup files from this morning from my work computer.

A happy note: I did get the OPML Editor installed on my desktop at home.

An admission of recklessness: I deleted gigs of files, thinking they were only OPML files I knew I had on an external drive. The thing was, the global search also included files mentioning OPML in the text, so there went my resume and god knows what else.

Don't ever trust me to be careful when I'm on a mission and thinking in terms of "I don't care about anything else; I want this."

 7/6/2010; 7:54:36 PM.   .

When I got the "no att table" error I, as Dave put it, "just started typing" after opening the window from Tools > Scripting2 > Open workspace.

And there I was imputing all kinds of irrelevant causes to it. I should just test and tell. And remember to use the "New Post" button. And forget any memory that remains in my fingers from the old OPML blog. That's hard though, it feels so familiar.

 7/6/2010; 7:46:01 PM.   .

When I got the "no att table" error I, as Dave put it, "just started typing" after opening the window from Tools > Scripting2 > Open workspace.

And there I was imputing all kinds of irrelevant causes to it. I should just test and tell. And remember to use the "New Post" button. And forget any memory that remains in my fingers from the old OPML blog. That's hard though, it feels so familiar.

 7/6/2010; 1:22:29 PM.   .

Try this.

 7/6/2010; 1:18:19 PM.   .

Hello this is Amyloo's new Scripting2 blog.

 7/6/2010; 7:53:37 AM.   .