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11/29/2007: "As I Ever Was ..."

I'm reminded of a line in a song by Toby Keith that goes like this:

I ain't as good as I once was, but I'm as good once as I ever was."

It's a line that's hard to sing, but easy to understand, particularly for those of us with a few years behind us.

There was a point in time when I could go all day and all night and not give rest a second thought. Those days are long behind me, but I can rise to the occasion - occasionally. Take Tuesday night. I got a call from a friend who needed help preparing a second hard drive for her laptop. It was 1:30AM by the time I drove her home, but she's a special friend who needed my help. I was as good once as I ever was.

What got me thinking of all of this was the recent effort to upgrade the forums here at SCMO. Over the life of the site, we've gone through several major refit periods. In each case, it meant a lot of time spent hacking code and making everything work. A decade ago, the thought of spending a couple of weeks up to my elbow in lines of code was exciting; now it's a drag - necessary, but a drag.

For a couple of weeks, I spent several hours a night preparing the old forums for conversion and adjusting the new code to make it more "SCMO-like". Thanks to Red Bull - something we didn't have the last time I had to do this - I got through it and now we have our newly-improved forums. I was as good once as I ever was.

Here's hoping it's a while before we have to go through that again ...