Here are some quick and easy steps to help you torture your friendly neighborhood geek when he/she stops being friendly:

Step 1: Break his/her legs, sprain his/her back, or otherwise comprimise his/her health so that sitting at a desk is painful. (If you have any nearby ticks, Lyme disease will work, too)

Step 2: Give her/him a laptop. However, make sure that the laptop is unstable: give it a power cord and hard drive that malfunction repeatedly.

Step 3: Due to the laptop’s flakey behavior, suggest that the geek “back up” things online. DO NOT suggest that the geek back up the online databases from her/his 4 blogs.

Step 4: Work with the system administrator/server person at the geek’s hosting company/friend who has the servers. Arrange for the servers to be offline indefinitely, and do not reply to the geek’s emails about his/her websites.

Step 5: Plot a vicious Denial of Service attack against the geek’s new server, taking the (newly moved) sites offline for 12 hours within the first 48 hours after moving the site.

Step 6: Conspire with Google to crawl the site when all the pages are inaccessible. This way when the geek tries to resurrect the database from Google’s cache of the entries, he/she will not be able to get about 25% of the entries. Conveniently make sure that those are the entries he/she wants up the most.

Step 7: Watch and laugh silently as the geek spends 4 days using a plugin, a Google search term, and copy/paste to re-enter 3/4 of the 3 sites attempted. In a fit of sympathy, allow the geek to take a few painkillers for the repetitive stress injuries sustained.

Step 8: Sit on the sidelines as the geek mourns the 2700+ missing entries, 6 years of blogging.

I’m partway back from never-never land. Hope you’re all doing well… I’ll try to make more upbeat posts once my neck and hands are hurting less…