On Friday, random competence hit home, when my web host figuratively crumbled its cookies as a server went down, only to come back up in the finale with the pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, thanks to pseudo-security settings and indomitably arcane weblog software.

Getting the static web pages back up was a snap, but the Patent Prospector weblog engine, Movable Type (MT), was not so easily persuaded to restart.

Movable Type (MT) is a hack job of scripts, badly documented. Technically MT is a disaster, as the MT developers utterly lack software design skill, and the code is of the spaghetti variety, so disparaged in the 1960s when undocumented Fortran wore its crown. Some things never change. But there's some sugar on top, because MT gives decent support, albeit nothing to write home about.

Once you commit to a blog system, it's a royal pain to switch to something else. Blog software has its own little ecosystem, so once you enter the swamp, leaving involves a serious commitment and willingness to wade in with new boots to what may be just another swamp. The grass is not always greener... Try finding a good blog consultant. I can't. Even the mediocre ones have a chalk-full client list, owing to the nature of the product. If you were a savvy software developer, why would gravitate to a third-rate environment? You wouldn't.

Good help is hard to find. Welcome to planet earth, overpopulated by humans who injudiciously run amok with smug self-approval masking hideous insecurity; it's an oxymoron in there.

By way of definition: "random competence" defines the collective - passable when everything is hunky dory, but prone to irregular displays of acts serving as cause for regret, if any quality of introspection existed, which it doesn't, hinting at the behavioral wellspring of existence of the collective. Randomly competent means generally incompetent, but occasionally okeydoke; from a distance, one may be fooled for a time. But people, almost always, are less than they seem; the rare exceptions to be cherished. The acronym for random competence is RC, hence the adjectival nickname "arsy," as in, "well, that's arsy."

"Random incompetence," on the other hand, delineates the threshold of the illuminati - competent, with random mistakes, owing to human fallibility. Hence, random incompetence. Mistakes happen to the best of us.

You won't be dishing out the ultimate complement of "very ri" very often, but "it's an arsy world" may become a habitual observation, because it is. The real name of this weblog is "The Arsy Patent Chronicles." Welcome back.