The gloves have been hung up.

Dear Friends,
After a long introspective time, I have decided that the best thing for me to do is to close the blog. I do not do so lightly.

I have come to consider many of you friends even though we have never met.

I wish to leave here making certain that you know that all of your kindnesses - comments, words of encouragements, sharing digital boots - (even giving me dozens of your orginal silvers (Mark), ad visits, and donations have all been extremely generous and very much appreciated.

Over the years you have let me share bits and pieces of my personal life (like the time that my wife had a surgery and complications) and my faith (still a follower of Jesus). I am grateful that you were not just a group of downloaders but you took time and contributed real sentiment and heartfelt wishes. You shared my moments of pain and happiness equally.

Why am I shutting it down?

The blog was originally a spin off of work that I was doing at guitars101.com where I posted to the rank of guru (highest level).

At that point in time guitars101 did not have a lossless section and there were always requests for such.

I decided to post on my own blog since my personal collection was greater than the combined posts of 101 (their forum now has a comparable assortment due to a large variety of people posting).

This blog began as a small hobby. A couple of posts every few days. I always have been a bit of an overachiever - due in part, I suppose, to inadequacies that I possess and that I try to compensate for.

The blog began a little following and soon a large one. I currently have 16,000+ "hits" a day and over 10 million total page views if you consider the previous 2 versions of the blog. According to more than one web analysis site I am in the top 3 in the world under the category of bootlegs.

The blog began a bit of a life of its own. More followers, more requests, more shares offered me, then donations (not often but every now and then over $100/mo). I was also making commissions based on my # of downloads with rapidshare (sometime $500/mo - program discontinued years ago) and megaupload ($500 every 6 month/ program AND site permanently discontinued). Then, of course were the ads by google which began to pay even larger commissions.

To make matters clearer: The hobby became a business that required a diligence that I never anticipated. It was still "sharing" and it was still very personal to me. And of course there were still financial incentives to keep it "worthwhile" - at least if I failed to factor in that I would get up an 1+1/2 hours early to work on my blog, spend any sleepless nights to work on my blog, my lunch breaks at work to work on my blog, etc. The posts of the last few days indicate roughly how I receive the posts and previous efforts show more plainly what I did with each post to clean them up and make them presentable to you.

When Google closed their ad program from my site it removed the last financial incentive other than the very rare donations that would come in. So I had to think to myself - is it worth the 50-100 hours that I spend a month on the blog for the returns that I receive? And I kept a promise that I would NEVER ASK for money.

Even though I never asked for money I began to feel a bit like a whore. I really started this thing as a mechanism to share my collection and then it became a mechanism to receive.

My hypocrisy was becoming evident to me. There remained a tension within me that said - you are doing this for the wrong reasons, it is becoming your master, this is not what you "preach" - you are posting things here for requests that you are philosophically opposed to,... You get the idea.

When I also factored in that there are many other fine sites that also offer boots it seemed that my choice was clear. Time to call it quits.

thx for bearing with my rambling.

I love you all,
Dave

PS I will post links on right column of my blog to other direct download blogs so that you and others will have good resources to access good boots in the future.

Some had asked if there will be a "reunion tour" of my blog.
The best answer is only when Sonny and Cher start touring again (or a more contemporary answer: when Guns N Roses do ;)

I will hover invisibly in the background to read comments from time to time so keep posting them please.

I will be selling 4 hard drives (2-3TB each) so that the boots will live on in somebody's home.

Hopefully they will be (or become) bloggers themselves.

Today I posted the ebay link to my second drive then 1 week later the next...