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It seems that another era at Club Josh will be coming to an end. The five of you that still look at this site have noticed that I haven't blogged in a long time as my attention as been distracted by Instagram and Twitter. I've been struggling to redesign this site for years and now it seems that my hand will be forced by my hosting company.

A little over a year ago, I found out that the server I was on was old and outdated and the nice folks at Joynet offered to move my site to a newer server capable of running the latest WordPress or Movable Type site. I was able to move my files over until I got to the Gorn Page and realized that it would take a huge effort to re-build that site as the software I use for the image galleries needed a big upgrade as well.

Life has a way of getting in the way of my site more and more, so the new site turned into just trying to get the old site running on the new server. For years, I've just struggled as to where to take my site. Do I return to a smaller, simpler 1995 era site with just a few pages of interest, or do I make the jump and put the site fully into a CMS that I can change the theme whenever it suits me.

I guess that the big problem is that my site is really a collection of smaller sites: Daily Update, The Gorn Page, Trip Diaries, and then some random misc pages held over from my original sites back in the 1990s.

Flash forward to August 2012 and I received a notice that my server will go away at the end of October, despite my purchase of a Mixed Grill "lifetime" account. Now as I fire away an email asking for a full refund of my purchase price, the reality is I need to sit down and figure out what I want to do with the site. Just a few years ago, the thought of just walking away from Club Josh was never a thought and I often mused that it would outlast my own life. Now, I must think of what I want my Internet presence to be (if anything).

I think a new site will be here soon. It will be leaner, more up to date, and hopefully be able to contain my microblogging feeds from Twitter and Instagram. Or shoot, maybe everything is just posted here and then fed to the other services..

At any rate, if you know of a good hosting provider let me know!

Once again I find myself waiting to see what the next step is for me at work. My time in Guest Services has come to a close (for now) and I am back in Tomorrowland for the time being. Today was my first day back and I am learning the Monorail. The Monorail is something that I have wanted to learn since I first came to Tomorrowland in 2005 and I am excited that I finally get to learn how to drive in the highway in the sky. I can't wait to see what will happen in the next month or so, but in the meantime, I am going to just enjoy myself and have a great time!!

Something I am trying on an interim basis is the first export of Club Josh. I know a lot of people are now on Facebook, including most of my friends (some I am sure will never make it there). Facebook has a nifty feature that allows the Daily Update to be imported into my profile so people can read my not-so-frequent musings without going all over the place. Of course, I think this will reduce my hits on ClubJosh, but as people know there is so much more than the blog on the site and hopefully they will visit. The more I think about it, my Facebook profile is more like what I wanted my Club House section of my site to be. Perhaps I should just screen shot it and repost it here.

Another thing I would like to figure out is to export my Facebook status (and/or my Loopt status) to a single line near the top of my Club Josh homepage. Anyone know how to do that?? I know perhaps involving a Twitter account? I do know that I want to be able to have one status and be able to post it across Club Josh and the rest of my social networking sites.

Having said that, ultimately, I want Club Josh to be the one stop for all my information (as it has been for the past 14 years) and I want to make sure any content that is generated on the other sites to be available here - rather than have all my CJ content on Facebook or another site. Is MySpace still around? I used to have a Friendster account and I finally deleted that after several years of non-use.

Maybe with the extra time I will have I will finally get Club Josh into the Web 2.0 era!

It's been 15 years since the Northridge Earthquake of 1994. I have blogged about it before, but Northridge has always been a fascination of mine. I love big quakes, and ones that occur in places I live or as the case with Northridge, where my family lived (and where I now live), really make me study them. I always remember Clarence Wayne Dean who rode that motorcycle off the freeway that collapsed rushing to perform his duty as a police officer. Thanks to that quake, we better understand ground motion and all of us in Southern California are safer.

On Thursday, a US Airways Airbus A320 crashed into the Hudson River in New York, and miraculously, everyone on board survived with only minor injuries. I, of course, was glued to CNN and the web looking for the latest news and photos etc. It really struck me how our society has changed in the last 15 years. In 1994, your only source was the networks and CNN. They had a few small independent video chasers that supplied everyone with similar footage but that was it.

Nowadays, 48 hours after a plane crash we have videos from surveillance cameras of the plane actually crashing into the water and thousands of photos from people's iPhones and other cell phones of the people standing on the wings waiting to be rescued and other shots of the plane floating down the river. To me it is amazing how much of everyday life is recorded - more so than any other time in history.

What an incredible source of data for NTSB investigators as well as historians who are looking to get details of a particular common event in our lives. Another example is on CNN.com - they are actively asking people who are attending Obama's inauguration to record it and photograph it and send it in - making it potentially the most recorded event in history.

The only down side is that I had planned on spending the whole weekend cleaning and working on my apartment, but now I am glued to the news waiting to see them hoist that plane out of the river.

Hats off to Sully and the rest of the crew for landing the plane spot on and getting everyone out safely!