I wonder how long we’ll have electricity and Internet access.

Apologies to regular readers. Somewhere off in some other state where the server that hosts NYM’s domain operates, there was some problem or maintenance issue, and we were down from mid-morning through the afternoon (EDT). Regular blogging will resume shortly.

Pity the fate of the less-than-top-rank right-wing blogger. Not only did the Age of Obama not create booming traffic for us, we’re actually an endangered species, argues John Hawkins.

[W]hen Barack Obama got into power, you’d have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the early Bush years.

That didn’t happen.

Sure, there were a few outliers that took off: Hot Air, Redstate, and the Breitbart empire for example, but most conservative blogs have either grown insignificantly, stayed the same size, or even shrank. Most bloggers on the right side of the blogosphere haven’t increased their traffic significantly in years. Moreover, the right side of the blogosphere as a whole is definitely shrinking in numbers as bloggers that have had trouble getting traction are quitting and fewer and fewer bloggers are starting up new blogs.

The problem is that there are no ecological niches vacant anymore, he contends. Insignificant microbes, to employ NZ Bear‘s metaphors, find it harder to evolve. You become a Crunchy Crustacean or even a Flappy Bird, and that’s it. The days of evolving into Higher Beings are over. There is simply too much higher quality competition for almost any blogger to overcome.

The market has also become much more professionalized. When I got started, back in 2001, a lone blogger who did 3-4 posts a day could build an audience. Unless your name is Ann Coulter, you probably couldn’t make that strategy work today.

Instead, most successful blogs today have large staffs, budgets, and usually, the capacity to shoot traffic back and forth with other gigantic websites. Look at Redstate, which is tied into Human Events, Hot Air which connected with Townhall, Instapundit, which is a part of Pajamas Media, Newsbusters which is a subsidiary of the Media Research Center and other monster entities like National Review and all of its blogs, Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, and the Breitbart media empire. An independent blogger competing with them is like a mom & pop store going toe-to-toe with Wal-Mart. Some do better than others, but over the long haul, the only question is whether you can survive on the slivers of audience they leave behind. …

Most bloggers are not very good at marketing, not very good at monetizing, there are no sugar daddies giving us cash, and this isn’t the biggest market in the world to begin with. In other words, this is a time-consuming enterprise, but few people are going to make enough money to go full time. How many people can put in 20-30-40-50 hours a week on something that’s not going to ever be their full time job? Can they do it for 5 years? 10 years? 15? 20? This is the plight that 99.9% of serious, independent conservative bloggers face. This has already created a lot of attrition and over the next few years, as people realize that their traffic is more likely to slowly, but surely significantly deteriorate rather than explode, you’re going to see a lot more people give up.

I think there is more than a small amount of truth in what he says. The top ranking bloggers are very, very talented people who are incredibly hard working, and the successful ones now have staffs. Few people and only the most professional are going to make it to the top.

But Ann Althouse is right in offering the response that not every conservative blogger is really trying to play the game professionally. A number of bloggers, like myself and the talented crew who publish at Maggie’s Farm, think of ourselves as “boutique bloggers,” catering to a smaller, but more sophisticated and discriminating, audience. Our blogging activities reflect our own eccentric and individualistic personalities.

I often think of my own blogging as just an alternative high tech way of forwarding links to my friends.

As to future readership growth, who knows? I do find it is much more difficult to get links from the top blogs anymore, but I also long ago quit emailing links to them seeking their attention. I’m looking forward to seeing what the 2012 election is going to do for blog readership myself.

Some people are predicting that blogging in general is already out of date, and arguing that blogs are already in the pricess of being replaced by new social networking formats like Google+.

I’m more optimistic. I think, on the prospects of blogging, we can refer to Henry David Thoreau’s estimate of the human condition generally: “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

I’m afraid that my Hughesnet satellite connection was useless yesterday and today during the morning hours when I usually post. Presumably the cloudy weather and recent storms had something to do with this.

I won’t be getting a lot of blogging done on Saturday. Worse, I won’t even be hunting.

Karen and I are attending an all day dog symposium at the National Sporting Library. Most of the program is irresistibly interesting.

It took from Friday to this morning for Hughesnet service to arrive. The transmitter on the dish (installed originally last April) suddenly expired Friday circa noon. I’m finally connected again just now.

One pays a price for living in the country: satellite modem, no cable, no DSL. One can be temporarily put out of business by an errant cloud, and every once in a blue moon something goes seriously wrong.

Naturally, my satellite hook-up expired totally around noon on Friday. I need a service call and won’t get one until Tuesday at the soonest.

I am posting this via an emergency dial-up account (which I managed to resurrect), but dial-up is almost impossible to use for postings.

Blogging will be extremely limited until my satellite receiver is fixed.

Happily, my self-inflicted partition disaster proved easy to get fixed.

I concluded that fixing the problem required using the kind of utility programs only PC repair shops have on hand to get in and eliminate that GRUB Linux boot-loader, so I hauled it down to Dok Klaus in Warrenton.

Klaus had it fixed the same day and only charged me for one hour of service.

As PC problems go, it was ultimately minor. Now I have my entire hard drive to play with.

NYM readers may at least be amused.

It’s like this. I bought a Sony Vaio laptop a good while back. It was a bargain, but it came with Vista installed.

At that particular moment in history, I was feeling experimental. I felt like playing with Linux, and I had a hankering to see if I could possibly adapt to the MAC OS environment, one button mouse, all that. So I got a free copy of Ubuntu and bought a copy of Leopard on Ebay. I had been reading that it was possible to install Leopard on a Vaio with some fiddling.

None of this worked out for me.

Leopard could not relate to the notebook’s videocard, and I simply gave up and installed XP on the second hard drive partition. I wasted hours trying to use Linux, but it was just too much trouble to overcome the absence of a readily available driver for the wireless modem. Linux worked fine. It just could not contact the Internet.

So there I was with 80 gb of my hard drive devoted to a Linux installation I was not actually using. But, hey, I still had about 60 gb with Win XP on it, which was working fine.

But, over time, that 60 gb was beginning to fill up. I trashed the games I wasn’t actively playing and purged several large programs. Then, I started moving all the image files off the PC onto various backup drives. But, finally, I had just installed Lightroom and Visio, and C: was getting close to full again. There were getting to be fewer movable items. I got to thinking last night that I ought to do something about all this.

So I Googled on the phrase “eliminate partition” and, lo and behold, there was a link to a discussion explaining that you could do that by hitting START>Control Panel>Administration Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management, then all you had to do was right click on the offending 80 gb Linux Partition, and select Delete.

What could possibly go wrong? I thought to myself. Ubuntu goes bye bye. The 80 gb Linux Partition returns to being part of the ordinary C: drive. I have lots of disk, and everyone is happy. So I hit “delete.”

Then I looked at the properties of the C: drive, so I could admire all the great new space I had created.

Hmmm. No change. The only difference was that second partition was now unlabeled.

I guess I need to reboot before the change goes into effect, I concluded. This would be the moment of truth. If I had screwed the pooch, I would soon find out. But, how likely was that?

My keen mind, doubtless impacted by age and senility, had overlooked the obvious consideration that I had installed Ubuntu first, and Ubuntu had put itself in charge of the boot-up process.

So the PC turns off, starts to come up, and GRUB (Ubuntu’s Grand Unified Boot-Loader) starts looking for that now-unlabeled Linux Partition, can’t find it, and sits there… permanently, announcing Error 17.

Error 17 means that GRUB can’t find the partition it’s looking for. It then freezes and sulks.

So, this is how to disable your PC and create a fine opportunity to research sub-operating system levels of PC operation in both Windows and Linux lands.

Blogging will be less frequent for a few days. I’m using an older, slower machine.

There won’t be a lot of blogging getting done today. We’ve been unpacking for a couple of days, and then arose at 4:30 A.M. this morning to drive up to the Dawn Easter Service at the Old Chapel (also here). Karen was part of the ensemble of singers performing Sacred Harp.

The Old Chapel is an unheated, unelectrified stone structure containing its original furnishings, and is the oldest Episcopalian church built west of the Blue Ridge. The slave gallery is, of course, a feature of ecclesiastical architecture unique to the South. Services began well before dawn and each person in attendance held a small wax taper with a circle of paper to guard the hand from hot wax drippings in the otherwise completely unilluminated old building.

After church, we went back to our old house on top of the Blue Ridge to pick up and transport another load, drove back to the farm, unloaded, changed clothing, and collapsed.

Two Sacred Harp shape note hymns can be heard performed on this 4:32 video

The singers at the Old Chapel this morning performed Green Fields, the second hymn on the video.

Curiously enough, we owe our access to Virginia hunting society to Sacred Harp signing. Karen met the Field Secretary of the Blue Ridge Hunt at a local Sacred Harp rehearsal and one thing led to another.

View from driveway near house looking toward gate

My wife and I had a bit of bad luck. When we moved to Virginia about three years ago, the real estate market was still high, and we had to pay through the nose for our current house. Values have plummeted, we’re a lot poorer than we used to be, and we concluded we would do better to take our losses on this particular real estate deal and move on.

Happily, we have found a new place. We’re moving to a smaller, but much older, house. The good news is that we are leaving six acres and moving to 131 acres, and the new place is a lot cheaper. You go through some stone gates and drive a few hundred yards before you even see the house. Karen was over at the new farm the other day, getting the invisible dog fencing installed, and along came the Old Dominion Hounds, hunting across our new property. (We know them and have been out with them on joint meets before).

Old Dominion descends from a private pack which used to be called Mr. Larrabee’s Hounds. Their button bears a griffin because they used to hold opening meets at the Griffin Tavern in Flint Hill. Mr. Larrabee founded his hunt back in 1924, at which time there was a shortage of foxes down in Fauquier County. So Mr. Larrabee imported a male European red deer, and proceeded (in the English fashion) to hunt the carted stag. I’ve run into old people who could remember the stag and the pack of hounds trotting home to kennels, companionably together, down the dirt roads after a day of hunting. Old Dominion’s country today includes the former territory of the Cobbler Hunt, whose MFH before WWII was George S. Patton, Jr. Our basset pack hunts the same territory. Appropriately for a skeptical person like myself, I will be moving to a town called Hume. We are still marveling at having moved so recently to Virginia, and finding ourselves not only hunt members but owners of a fixture. We’ll get to serve port and ham biscuits to the Old Dominion crowd when they meet at our place.

I have already concluded that Confederate forces could very possibly have bivouacked on our place on the way to the Second Battle of Manassas. I look forward to bringing in the metal detecting crowd. I’ll be a short distance from the Rappahannock (the shad and striped bass run into the river in the Spring) and there are brook trout in the upper reaches of the Rapidan. We may be in an economic depression and living in Obamistan, but things could be worse.

Stucco over fieldstone Antebellum Virginia farmhouse

We’re moving deeper into Virginia, leaving our current home with six acres atop the Blue Ridge for a 131 acre farm in Fauquier County not far from the Rappahannock. The moving process is a bit of an ordeal, and I’ll be busy sorting books and packing up breakable collectibles myself for days. Blogging will be intermittent and sparse, I’m afraid, pretty much all week. My apologies.