This past Friday evening brought some interesting events. It all started in a rather ordinary way.
I was engaged in my usual Friday night activity, preparing my ArtKos post for the next morning. This was to be volume 338 to be exact. As usual, I started with a photo of the painting. Each week brings a new photo showing the changes since the last installment. Sometimes it takes a few tries but the first photo worked this time around. Thus began the photo editing and drafting of the diary.
Now I have a fondness/affinity for old hardware and old operating systems. I've been using my recently acquired 10 year old aluminum Powerbook G4, a thundering 867 mhz powerhouse. Well, it was a thundering powerhouse in 2002. With old hardware comes old operating systems, this being Mac 10.4. I use Xee for photo cropping and the resized the photo with Image Tool. (Yes, if there is obscure software, I will find it. Majorgeeks is one good source.) Of course, old operating systems bring with them older browsers, and there is where the problems sometimes start. But more about that later.
I wrote the post for Saturday morning and uploaded it to new diary entry along with the now edited photo. It went without any problems. Next, I scheduled the post for autopost on Saturday morning. All good. Then the problem began.
I needed to go back in and suddenly found that strange messages popped up. Something about making too many recent comments. Strange, I'm not much of a commenter. I have a few attempts at snark each day and one or two greetings in community diaries. That couldn't be right. But, I was unable to do any further editing. In fact I was unable to do anything, comment, give mojo or send messages.
I assumed that it was my current favorite browser at fault, Icab, the internet taxi. Well, perhaps taxi is a bit inaccurate. Internet tortoise might sometimes be more accurate, especially with DK4 bloatware software. But I was to learn that old software was not the problem, at least not this time around.
For some reason, I decided to click over to my profile page. I was at least able to do that. Then I noticed it. The skull and crossbones appeared below my screen name. I'd heard about this happening to other kossacks. I was bojoed. I was banned.
Had I committed some offensive act or made an inappropriate comment? Not that I could recall. I sat and thought. I emailed a few kossacks and wondered what could have happened.
Then something strange happened. (As if this night wasn't strange enough.) I found myself in another place. I was walking in a dimly lit land. A dark river ran alongside me. I heard what sounded like several dogs howling. So this was the true meaning of being bojoed. I was banished to another realm. Suddenly, a ferryman drew his boat alongside me. He asked if I required passage to the other side of the river. I asked the name of the river. I can't recall his reply exactly. Something with an S.
But as soon as his reply came, I found myself drawn back from that dimly lit land. I was again at the keyboard of the old powerbook, once again fricking/fracking about old software. And all my dkos abilities had been restored. It was...a life and death,...and life experience. My bojo nightmare was over.
******
Yes, this is a true story, although I may have exaggerated the part about the river.