I found it! --and why I have so many e-mail addresses.

Remember those bumper stickers?

Well, I lost my blog -- duh! Now I found it again.

What happened was this:

A few months ago we (Billie and I) became dissatisfied with our ISP. Sometimes the service was great and sometimes it sucked. (This, of course, is the U.S. ISP. The one in Roatan always sucks.)

So we decided it was time for a change.

If you've ever changed ISPs (and who hasn't?) you'll know that we now faced the agony of e-mail address changes. It would be nice if we could just tell everyone in our address book (via a blast e-mail) our new address, but spam filters would block the blast even if we could get it to go out!

By way of history, another reason for the change is that our ISP had changed its domain name twice in the previous year. So people who were writing to a year-old address were getting dumped and people who were writing to a six-month old address were also getting dumped. Meanwhile, we had three inboxes for each e-mail address, to correspond with the three different domain names!

So, in a stroke of brilliance, we decided to create our own domain name and forward from there. If you're keeping up with this, you may remember the domain alandbill.com, as in alan@alandbill.com and billie@alandbill.com. Now we didn't EVER need to change our e-mail address again, and we were freed from the tyranny of ISPs.

Alas, it didn't work out that way.

From time to time e-mails would be bounced from our own domain without our knowledge. And sometimes messages would just disappear into that great bit-bucket in the sky. What had promised to be a solution became a bigger problem!

But to get back to the ISP story, we tried a different ISP. So we now also replicated our previous e-mail addresses on the new ISP. And probably told some people those addresses -- are you confused yet?

But wait -- it gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view!) When we found out that alandbill.com was losing e-mails, we decided to try something different -- Gmail. And we also found that we could use our Thunderbird e-mail client to send and receive from Gmail.

So far, apart from sometimes selecting e-mails as spam which should not be, Gmail seems to have been 100% reliable . It even saved me yesterday when Thunderbird starting acting up, because I could use the Gmail webmail account.

What has all this got to do with the blog, you ask? I was coming to that ...

When I set up the blog, I used a Gmail account and password. However, by the time I came to make a second entry (several hours later) I couldn't remember how to get there! Today, it dawned on me that I can link to it from my Gmail account, if only I could remember which Gmail account it was!

The rest is history.

Except that I forgot to mention that after running two ISPs in parallel for a few months it became apparent that the new one is too slow for us and cannot give us more bandwidth. So we're planning on dropping it and reverting to the old one. The good news is their bandwidth seems to have improved and is now streets ahead of their competitor.

I just hope they don't change their domain name again.