Canne did! Just a couple of things:

1. Never was good with the idea of "carnival", and much prefer organic linking for the incremental discovery. For the bulk discovery - blogroll. Keep it updated. Carnivals "push" the discovery: it happens when the carnival occurs, and not when I want it.
2. Going on hiatus unannounced is a problem? Why don't you learn to use a feedreader. Here, click to Google Reader for example. It wasn't so difficult now, was it? If you do not want to give your privacy to Google, install a standalone reader app.

UPDATE: John Sato joins in with love of blogroll. So far so good, but there's a little flaw in his methodology:

I am on twelve other blogger's blogrolls (that I know of) [...] And yet, the most any of these blogs has gotten me in terms of traffic is about sixty-three pageviews. All-time.

I'm wondering if John realizes that people who peruse blogrolls look for blogs to subscribe. If one of these 63 does, that act delivers way more pageviews than John accounts.