kirabug’s idea files

There’s been some talk in the past few months on the web about whether it’s OK to revise your site. I don’t think we’re going to have a Boingboing-level event here, well, in my lifetime, but I believe in transparency and discussion. Just to get it on record so that if some day my readership explodes, here are the general policies around here:

• Typos: I fix ‘em.
• Broken links: If I can fix them, I do. If I can’t, I remove them. When I’ve removed a link, I underline the previously-linked words, and tag the article “broken links stripped out”. (The tagcloud reflects how bad a problem this is currently, as “broken links stripped out” is one of our hottest tags. In fact, that’s why I’m writing this.)

Now here’s the part where we get into dicey territory:

• If a whole post had nothing but a link to an article that’s no longer there, I remove it. Usually we’re talking about articles with one line, and a link — or just a link, and nothing else. It won’t do you any good to read it, and it’s just taking up server space. So I delete those altogether. There’s no getting them back, either. They’re gone.
• If a post has some additional commentary that I think might still add value even with no valid links, or if there’s only one broken link in a set, I generally leave it up.
• The difference between deletion and survival is totally at my whim.

The prevailing thought around the policies above is that you should never ever ever have to visit my site and deal with broken links or any other kind of broken behavior. It’s irresponsible. And it pisses me off to no end when I visit other sites and end up reading posts that look like they’ll be helpful only to find out all the links are broken.

On the other hand, I have a large number of posts and not an infinite amount of time, so I don’t scrub things as often as I could or should.

And here’s the part wherein I disagree with entire sections of the internet:

• If I said something I truly horribly regret and it’s less than 48 hours old, I’ll delete that post and replace it with commentary that says I removed it and why.

Why? How dare I? Because it’s my site and I can. If I cut the words “You suck” into my hair, and then regret it, I have the option to shave my head. Everyone will know I shaved my head, though they might not know the full reason why, and I’m OK with that. It’s my head. If I paint my house puce and then repaint it, the same rules apply. So why should I be held to an arbitrary paper standard that says I can’t unpublish what I’ve already published?

In truth, this has happened once in the 8 years I’ve been blogging. Will it happen again? That depends on whether someone gets me talking about politics again, but I’d like to say it’ll be rare. On the other hand, it’s fair to you, the reader, to know that what you read here today might not be there tomorrow. That’s true everywhere on the Internet, but I’ll at least admit to it.

I was reading a post by our own peri-renna earlier where he noted LiveJournal’s new policy of removing the option to create new Basic accounts and he mentioned how it might just be time to leave LiveJournal as a blogging base.

I can’t agree more, but not for the reasons you’d expect.

Let me say up front that having a membership to most of the places below is certainly worthwhile, because it allows you to a) comment on folks’ posts, and b) establish a web presence of your own because your comments will thus link back to your blog (your real one, or a LJ page that tells folks where to find your real one), thus giving you a consistent face across the web. If you don’t want a consistent face across the web, then you don’t have to worry about it.

And I practice what I preach. I have jump pages on Geocities, Comcast, Xanga, LiveJournal, and Blogger…. I have a profile on Facebook if you can find it, I sure as hell can’t…. I have a Wordpress.com login but their software is smart enough to point straight to my Wordpress.org blog so I don’t have to maintain an extra jump page there. I think that’s all of them. Probably.

But the ‘net’s a lot like maintaining residency. Except for this site, all those pages above are just PO Boxes that forward contacts to my home, which is here. And why is my home here?

Well, let’s look at the options.

I always viewed Myspace as a co-ed high-school sleepover when the parents were out of town. When I was old enough to hold those kinds of sleepovers, we held them on Prodigy’s chatboards, not on our own web space, because most of the planet didn’t know what web space was. So I don’t have a Myspace account — and I’m a snob — I’m proud of that.

LiveJournal’s like living in the college dorms - more civilized, but you’re still sharing a bathroom with your 20 closest neighbors, even if you don’t like them. (Xanga’s the same, only at a small private junior college that doesn’t advertise well.) Livejournal is totally about community, which is why I’m amused that they’ve shut down basic accounts. My only (totally uneducated) guess is too many “kids” (who turn out to be 35-year-olds who aged well) who move in, slip ads for the latest stock/penis/Canadian drug scam under everyone’s door 35 times a night, get kicked out, add a fake mustache, and then try it again.

Blogger is LiveJournal’s sister university, only with a different password.

Facebook is a college in the middle of the city with six separate campuses that require me to learn both the bus and the subway in order to get to class, buy groceries, hang out with my friends, or even I swear to God find the bathroom. And they tore up all the maps. There must be some skill to navigating that place that only those under 25 are privvy to, because damned if I (or most of the people my age at work) can figure it out. What’s the cheat code to see the map? Up up down down left right left right select start? The only way I find anyone is to wait until my sister’s friended them and then steal her friends.

Anyway, at some point, you graduate. Sometimes you get your own place before they boot you out the door and charge you $30 for your own damn diploma, and sometimes you don’t. I moved out early, to Geocities, which like its sister tripod resembled having your own studio apartment over a bar in a rowdy section of town — and the landlord had hung neon signs for the bar and exotic dance studio right outside your window so everyone who visited could see them. Plus, it turned out that much like MySpace now, most of your neighbors were colorblind and addicted to the blink tag drug. So regardless of how many pretty flowers you planted or how clean and usable your apartment was, just living in that neighborhood left the impression that you were just as bad.

So I moved to Earthlink, and then when we physically moved, to Comcast. But I still don’t have any address of my own on either of those (in fact on Comcast I had to use my husband’s webspace because he’s primary on the account - teh suxxors!) and like an apartment with a laid-back landlord, I’m not allowed to gut the wiring or tear out the walls even if I can paint, install shelving, and upgrade the coffeemaker. Plus, I knew that the next time I moved, I’d have to change my address *again* and after moving all these boxes and files 3 times, that was getting old.

I could have moved to Wordpress.com. They’re a nice dorm-style apartment with free blogging similar to Livejournal, lots of features, and a generally mature set of neighbors. In fact, they’re mature enough that the primary topic of most posts and blogs appear to be politics and news, so maybe they’re less dorm and more graduate housing.

But honestly, I needed to feel like I had a permanent place of my own — one where as long as I pay the mortgage on time every December, and don’t break the law (read: terms of service) I get to keep my address and all my stuff. I’d been blogging for close to 5 years by then if you count Geocities, and I had pictures, thoughts, and memories from all that time stored up. (Someday I really am going to get all of them imported into here btw.) So I shopped a lot of hosts, using Google as my real estate agent, and finally settled down here.

And even having moved here, we changed mortgage companies once, from Midphase hosting to Hostmonster. Maybe mortgage company’s a bad analogy, because they also own access to all the utilities — rabid homeowner’s association maybe? — and once Midphase had cut off my power and water one too many times for no good reason, I signed up with Hostmonster. I have only excellent things to say about Hostmonster.

As for the actual house, well, your host doesn’t provide a very good one, just a foundation and connections for all your pipes. (OK, maybe it’s more like an RV park?). So for a while I built all my own walls all the time, but that’s inefficient, especially when you’re ready to do something like change the fonts. That’s when I decided to hit the hardware store, and boy, Wordpress has been awesome. (I hear Drupal is just as good, but I haven’t tried them.) You go to their website, download their software, install it, and then you’re free to do virtually anything you want. You can download someone else’s interior decoration or build your own, paint, tear out the walls, redo the piping, add free furniture, it’s all available. I’ve even found a way to add an addition (what the rest of you call a forum) and as soon as work settles down I’m going to look into perhaps building that addition.

Granted, just like finding a residence, the more features you want, the more responsibility you need to take on. I wasn’t allowed to replace the floors in my apartment, but on the other hand a guy came out to fix the leaky toilet and didn’t charge me, either.

So there you go: the hierarchy of hosting options, dressed mostly-cleanly in a housing market analogy. If you’re one of the many folks getting the itch to upgrade your digs and find yourself a new home, give it a shot! There’s no reason to torch the old place yet… but maybe you just don’t need to live there anymore.

This is an interesting article for a number of reasons.

1. It discusses the risks of blogging in your own name and not knowing (or knowing and discounting/not caring) what your day job’s policy on such things is. It’s both a warning and a lesson - and since most of us who read the internet also participate, it’s worth taking note.

2. It discusses CNN’s policies for blogging, and their lipservice to bloggers, and how they really treat the bloggers they (sometimes don’t even know they) have. As for me, I’ll admit I’ve never been a big CNN fan, but this certainly doesn’t help the cause.

3. It discusses how media’s sold out to ratings and shareholders (something I’ve discussed before and stopped delivering actual news unless it’s absolutely necessary.

I hope Mr. Pazienza succeeds in helping to revolutionize the news to actually, y’know, report news again.

Monday:
Arrived at the hospital at 7:30. Pre-op started around 9. I read all of Dragonsblood between 7:30 and around 1. It’s worth the read, and is especially good when coupled with an iPod to drown out the soap operas in the waiting room.

(Side tangent:
Seriously, I swear that hospitals ought to be banned from being allowed to show soaps in waiting rooms. It was bad enough that I was subjected to a couple horrible morning shows and a portion of the New York Columbus Day parade when I was in Philadelphia. But it was followed by absolute horrors on the soaps.

• First, lots of bawling from this grown man whose daughter was in a hospital bed for Lord knows what fabricated reason. Also: some woman lost a baby, and I don’t mean she misplaced it.
• Then, the next show takes us into the middle of some dead guy’s funeral. Because what we all really need to see when we’re in the surgery/ICU waiting room, with our own personal levels of drama and trauma to deal with, is a bunch of people mourning with the melodrama dial set on “high”.
• As if that wasn’t enough, the next show started with some guy being drug to his feet by his daughter after having his head all but bashed in by some unknown assailant, and ended with a nice-looking guy who was just trying to ruin someone else’s relationship collapsing on a porch. Sort of like the woman who’d had the stroke, whose kids were sitting a few chairs away from me.
• And then there was Oprah, who felt it necessary to tell me things about the human body I didn’t want to know.

NOT HELPFUL.)

The TV update-you-on-your-spouse-in-surgery thing in the hospital indicated Nighthawk was in recovery (post-op) by 1:15, which coincidentally was just a little before his mom and brother arrived. I popped out of the waiting room just long enough to greet them, get some yogurt, and totally miss Nighthawk’s doctor, who instead called me and let me know everything went incredibly well and he should be placed in a room soon.

By 4:00 we were hearing rumors that there were no beds available, so I finally cornered a nurse who invited me back to Recovery to see Nighthawk. He was understandably grouchy that he’d been counting holes in the ceiling for three hours. Since he wouldn’t waste energy being grouchy if he was in serious trouble, I took that as a good sign.

Nighthawk didn’t get a room until 6:30. It made for a long day, and he hadn’t even met his nurses yet.

On the other hand, once he was finally upstairs everything was great. I cannot say enough positive things about Presbyterian Hospital or the staff that we dealt with. They had a lot to manage, between the thyroid removal, the cystic fibrosis treatments, the diabetes treatments, and the fact that Nighthawk was running about 4 hours later than anyone’d expected just to arrive, but they did a great job of making him comfortable, making sure he had everything that he needed, and setting our expectations for the night. Nighthawk’s nurse even hunted down a recliner for me to sleep in, so I could stay there with him overnight.

Tuesday:
We both caught some frequently-interrupted sleep between the end of Monday Night Football and 6:45, when the first doctor arrived to scope him out (literally) and remove the drain in his neck. After some blood work, a healthy breakfast, another check-in by the docs, and the usual rounds of meds they declared him healthy enough to leave, and he was given his discharge papers before I could even finish my (admittedly late) breakfast.

We were in the car and on the way home by 10:30 yesterday morning. Nighthawk was comfy in his recliner by noon, and I was off fighting with an idiot pharmacy where nobody can count until around 3.

Today:
So how is he? He still hasn’t gotten his whole voice back yet but he hasn’t been in any significant pain the whole time (hasn’t even been on pain meds for most of the last two days) and is in a good mood. He’s still pretty damn tired, which I pretty much expect.

To be clear, having the thyroid removed is not in and of itself a cure for thyroid cancer. There’s still much to be done, including treatments with radioactive iodine and scans and balancing of new medications. Whee. But the first hurdle has been surpassed, and we get a short break before the festivities continue.

And how am I? Relieved. And exhausted. Possibly as exhausted as he is. My day today consisted of calling back various doctors to schedule various follow-up appointments, and then visiting my own doctor for another round of battle-the-sinus-infection. (My in-laws, who had awesomely taken JessieDog for the overnight, also stopped by to return her today.) It’s currently just after 11:00, a time I could easily stay awake past two weeks ago, and I’m barely awake enough to write this post.

Tomorrow I go back to work. Tomorrow night I might get working on Saturday’s comic. With luck everything goes back to on schedule from this point forward.

Every day is a new adventure. This week has been a set of adventures I’m glad to say I had overestimated. Thanks to everyone who’d sent their prayers, positive vibes, or whatever, in our general direction.

Nighthawk’s been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He’s having surgery to have his entire thyroid removed on Monday.

So now that you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, here are the details. Thyroid cancer itself is rare but very treatable. It was caught very early. From all indications this should be a case of cutting out the thing that went bad, probably doing some radiation treatments that are standard to the disease, and moving on. He’ll be on drugs the rest of his life, obviously, but he already is (obviously), just for other stuff. The CF and the diabetes certainly complicate matters, but outside of the constant challenge of making sure that each doctor understands the pieces the other doctors specialize in, in this case neither issue directly affects the cancer surgery or recovery.

He’ll likely spend about 24 hours in the hospital. He’ll be home for a total of about 2 weeks if everything goes according to plan.

Obviously this is not minor surgery and we’re both very concerned. On the other hand, there are thousands of people who’ve come through this with nothing more than a new thyroid drug or two to add to their regimen. We’re freaking out in controlled bursts instead of constantly.

So why am I telling you all of this? Well, for one, the comic is half imagination and half journal comic, and as today’s edition illustrates some aspects of this new turn of events are going to bleed through.

In addition, it should be obvious to everyone that he is by far the highest priority in my life, so there’s a chance the comic will be delayed or skipped for medical events. (Right now I give no guarantees for a Tuesday comic.)

And there is a piece of me that, as an author, thinks y’all are going to think it’s over the top to have the character with cystic fibrosis also get diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Believe you me, I’d've never planned it this way. It is over the top.

Thanks for reading.

So I’ve been pretty busy. Working hard at work, and resting hard at home. We spent the first half of the weekend with family, celebrating birthdays and fixing computers. We spent the second half of the weekend with appliances - dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, etc. Right now is computer time: I’m trying to fix some new problems in the forum, and Nighthawk is trying to learn all the patterns to beat Pac Man.

Yeah, I don’t even ask anymore.

Anyway, it looks like one of the bb plugins I’d added prevented everyones’ signatures from displaying on the bulletin boards. I’m still trying to hunt out why but suspect I’ll be doing a lot of code rewriting in the near future. Ah well, that’s how you learn, right?

It’s been, well, quiet lately. A lot of people seem to be off doing there own thing. The forums have been quiet, friends have been out of touch, even the comic community seems to be quieter than usual. Or maybe it’s just me - I’ve been so busy I haven’t been around to cause my usual level of trouble.

Oh, I did have some fun participating in some Fark Photoshop contests. They’re here and here and as long as you heed the “NSFW” warnings on some pics, they’re safe for work

I’m staying about a week ahead on comics and have more stuff to add shortly. I think. I’m still knitting and working on my Mother’s Day gift too.

That’s all that’s new here. How’re you all?

We’re lacking comics, sorely.

Fortunately, there are so few people reading this thing anyway, that I haven’t heard any complaints. You’re welcome to complain if you’d like. It won’t get you far, but it’s nice to hear another voice in the wilderness.

Nighthawk’s been diagnosed with diabetes, which was a bit more than either of us were ready to handle. It’s led to a bit more silence on the ‘net than I usually exercise. Some days a person just doesn’t feel like reading half the internet and commenting on it. I prefer to do my worrying in private and wait until I have something concrete to report before worrying everyone else.

It’s also led to doctor’s appointments, researching, asking around, gathering information, and most of all being there for each other — all of which takes precious time.

In addition, it’s tax season, which means almost nothing to you if you don’t work in the financial industry. But where I work, tax season is the functional equivalent of the Christmas shopping season for retail, with tax weekend playing the role of Black Friday. The metaphor is especially fitting this year because Easter and Passover are layered on top of April 15th (17th this year) and that means work, work, and more work. So interspersed among the medical appointments and research and general freakiness have been tickets and calls and overtime, and more overtime, and oh, some overtime.

Case in point: our department was open today, from 8 to 7, despite the fact that it’s a company holiday. I’ll be a member of the skeleton staff working tomorrow as well. (Had I known about the health circus, I wouldn’t have volunteered months ago, but alas, my crystal ball is still waiting to be RMA‘d back to the manufacturer.)

Speaking of hardware returns, did I mention that the file server has been nothing but one big technical glitch for close to a month? Fortunately, I don’t use it to produce the comic or the blog. Unfortunately, it is where I run all my backups, and where I pay all the bills, so life is interesting, as usual.

But at least the dog’s healthy, right? Well, no. She was shipped to the vet for day camp today while I worked because she’s sleeping a lot. A whole lot. Like when we came home on Wednesday at noon she didn’t bother coming downstairs to greet us until 7 pm. And any time I have to ask my husband to go find out if the dog has died twice in one day, it’s time to worry. The x-rays of her lungs and heart came back clean so now we’re waiting on the blood test results to determine if she’s sick or just really old and really lazy.

Oh, and I still have that knitting project to finish.

There are rays of sunshine throughout all of this, mind. The hardware repairs have prompted some upgrades. The diabetes explains a lot, and means Nighthawk will feel better than ever once it’s treated. Seven hours of overtime tomorrow mean I get to work in relative peace and quiet. Tax season is almost over. I get to dye eggs tomorrow. The Phillies look like they’re going to win 3 in a row after sucking like a giant Electrolux when the season began. And when it’s all said and done, I should have a chance to just sit back and relax.