I think I've mentioned around here that my daughter's got her own site. I've always wanted to have one for her but I've refrained for several reasons. The big one is that my ex-husband is floating around the Internet somewhere. Our divorce was mean and nasty and I've endured the occasional veiled threat from him over the years (they're few and far between though thank goodness). Long story short, he hasn't seen her since she was 6 months old and we escaped from him and his evil family. (Before you ask, I don't let her read my blog, and I've never spoken ill of him to her on the rare occasion she's asked about him - but here, I might slip with the odd insult or two). For the record, he's also over $12,000 in debt for child support. Thank goodness I've never depended on it, though there have been plenty of rough times when it would have helped tremendously.

But I digress, the reason I've never given my daughter her own website is because I don't want him to stumble onto it. I also don't want creepy paedophiles lurking about etc etc. So there are rules with her site. It's not to be submitted to search engines, we don't mention her real name, no mention of local area names that kind of thing. I don't mind if she gets some visitors in from my site, they're mostly going to be Placebo fans anyway :D But she can have a place of her own to chat with her school friends in a private, mum supervised area and forum, talk about her day in her own blog (same rules apply there) and play games. I think she likes it too.

I'll tell you what is at the root of most issues online: the fact that text doesn't come close to conveying feeling. Sure you can use smilies, you can even blatantly say 'I'm Joking!' but it's simply not enough. Without the visuals of reading body language and facial expressions, it's far too easy to misread an innocent comment.

The reason I bring this up today is that I've had a bit of a slagging match myself today and I wasn't really involved but I jumped in anyway to defend someone I know (virtually - I've never actually met her, but we get on in the forums anyway). I won't bore you with the details but suffice to say it was incredibly difficult to hold my tongue. Since I'm a moderator, I try and make myself be the peacemaker rather than the instigator but today I just couldn't help it. I'm pretty good at diffusing arguments and fights between other users, I've had years of training with it on TCZ as that is part of an Administrator of my rank's job. I really have to watch myself there, but I'm a little freer on the Placebo forums to voice my own opinion and there isn't such a necessity to remain unbiased.

So how far do you take it? Do you let it get to the point where you're calling each other a bitch? How long do you let the rest of the users on the forum read the dirty laundry before you think, maybe this should be settled privately? Before anyone asks, I just backed up a friend, I wasn't actually involved in the argument, but I did receive a nasty private message from the instigator telling me to get my fact straight before I have a go at her. Little did she know that I had my facts all in a row and was just fine to step in and defend a friend that this instigator was publicly being nasty to.

Anyway, there have been some interesting developments on the band forum. The special chatroom called 'digichat' has been moved over to the fan club section and numerous, various non fanclub members have been trying to hack it for some reason. Just wanting to cause trouble no doubt, the silly gits. What's also funny about these same people is that one or two of them are under the mistaken impression that I have nothing better to do than sit around waiting to close threads and ban people. I find that incredibly amusing because A. I only close threads if they go off topic, are 'chatty' threads (bandwidth is a big issue), or if they start slagging other users within a thread. This stuff doesn't happen all that often, so I don't really close threads as much as they like to think. And B. I don't have the administrative powers to ban a single person from the forums. How funny is that? This person swears up and down that I have banned them at least 9 times when, if they weren't being such a wanker, they would get it through their head that I can't ban anyone. This kind of one-track thinking is exactly how the whole 'nazi mod' phenomenon gets started.

Have I mentioned that before? Apparently all mods (on any forum really) are Nazis and we all live to close threads and ban people. And if you happen to be the person who runs the whole shebang, then you are obviously Hitler and have nothing better to do then 'stalk' these users and harrass them into quitting. If you could see my face right now, you would see me rolling my eyes. I think the actual truth of the matter is that these alleged harrassed users have nothing better to do with *their* time than sit around dreaming up ways to justify their obnoxious behaviour. But of course, that's only the opinion of one of the Nazis.

Ok I'm going to try and stop harping on the whole Nazi thing. It doesn't bother me per se, these people don't know me and really are just looking for someone to blame for their own behaviour. I just find it an interesting analogy. Moderator of an Internet Forum = Member of an inhuman army responsible for mass genocide. It almost makes me feel sorry for them when I think of it in those terms :)

Sorry! Didn't mean to whinge away, I'm just frustrated - this is the downside of Life Online. You're in the middle of a meaningful conversation with someone and bam, your modem decides you've been online long enough so it cuts you off. Or, you've just made a large amount of changes to your website and you have it looking all pretty and perfect and - uh-oh, the mouse won't move. Nothing is moving! It's all frozen! AHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhh!!!! You're screwed. I cannot stress enough: SAVE frequently. Make a change? Hit the save button.

You know, I used to be afraid of computers. Well not 'afraid' per se - I didn't have nightmares about getting sucked up into the monitor or anything like that :), more like a knowledge that computers were far too complicated for me so I never really gave them a shot. We had a Commodore 64 when I was in school and I never did much on it except play games. I think I tried to code a program that, when you typed 'run' it would display a smiley face. Needless to say it didn't work and thus ended my foray into computer programming and so I went about my life never thinking of computers as a possible career choice. Until I discovered the Internet in my first year at college.

This was back in the day when the Net was still very new to most people. Nevertheless I was hooked. I wanted to be able to do everything; make my own websites, put pictures online, make my own graphics. So with the help of Geocities (yes, Geocities sucks these days, but as a learning tool, it's fantastic), the old 'View Source' option and the help of some very patient online friends who were much smarter than me, I began to discover what my niche would be in life (good thing too, because I was really floundering for a while there). I discovered I wasn't half bad at it which was quite a surprise to me.

See, I grew up with an incredibly talented mother who could write beautiful prose, paint gorgeous pictures and generally excel at any artistic medium she tried her hand at. Not that I begrudged her any of it - not at all because, well, she was my mom. She used to encourage me though. When I was younger, and I came home from school without any homework, she's have a tin can full of scraps of paper with tasks on them that I would have to complete before she got home from work. Sometimes it was 'write a haiku about a bird' and then I'd have to go find out what a haiku was, or it was 'sketch the big tree in the front yard'. No matter how bad my finished product was, she always found something good in it to notice and encourage. She was so cool.

One problem with my newfound future was that at the time, there were no real courses on web design offered and so I had to teach myself (and this is when techie friends and 'view source' came in very handy). So now, a few years later I'm not quite as naive and I'm finding myself in the position of someone else's 'techie friend' so it's sort of come full circle - nifty eh?

Anyway, I was off home today. I went into work this morning feeling under the weather (I've been battling a monster headache for quite some time now and today it seem amplified) and it just continued to get worse as the morning progressed. I wanted to leave but I had a meeting on a big project I'm working on. Soon as that was done though, I was out of there. I haven't done much online today because my head still hurts and I don't really know why I'm talking about this - it's got nothing to do with life online :) Just wanted to whinge I guess :)

Ah these damn smilies. I use them far too much, usually as punctuation. I never used to. But now it's gotten to the point where I have to edit them out of emails at work because it's so second nature to jab that colon and end parenthesis :) <--See? If you use MSN messenger, yahoo, or Aohell it can be even more annoying because the smilies are huge and actual little graphics instead of simple text. I'm forever apologising to those poor souls I chat to for my overuse of the damn things. Anyone else have that problem?
They're great for helping convey feeling though. Especially if you're trying to make a joke that people might not get without the use of the winky ;) it's a tough decision. To winky or not to winky. Sod it, I'll keep using them :)~

I grew up in California and I had so many friends out there that I miss terribly. I went back to see them last year and it was very painful for me, knowing I had to return to Nebraska. I know I should make more of an effort to like this place, it's not as bad as I make it out to be really... It just isn't... me.

So I spend time online. I've made a lot of friends - some I've met and some I haven't but would dearly love to. I've had a relationship or two develop online carry over into an offline relationship. They didn't end happily but I'm proud to say I'm still friends with each one of them (three, if you must know :) So I log on and meet my friends from all over the world. I use the Net for my job. I surf the web and do research. I look for those lyrics, to that one song, that everyone loves but no one can make out all the words. I get into debates about things I never dreamed I'd be talking about, like politics in Northern Ireland, homophobia, religion, you name it... I find myself learning more and more. I've had more opportunities to travel since I've been on the Net then ever before, and have ventured to Vegas, New England, and finally England itself! (Even booked my flight online!). I moved to the UK for a year after I finished college, and I got so much info on how to do it from the Net. How I should be sure and get a check guarantee card, and who to use to transport my things. How to enroll my daughter in school there. This sort of info would take months and months to gather, and I found it in minutes.

So really, think of me what you will, my life is really full of wonderful things, and the Internet happens to be one of them. I love each and everyone of the friends I have made along the way. Not everyone is a psycho-stalker, real life is not the X-Files. There are a lot of truly good people out there, just waiting to meet you :) The thing about the Net is that you get to know people by their personality first, without all the superficial judgements. And that is how it should be in real life, unfortunately it's not. People will always be judged by how they look before taking the time to get to know the person inside. We're all guilty of it. How can we not do that with all the conditioning we're subjected to by advertisers and shallow people?

This is my creative outlet. I have learned a lot about myself because of the Internet, and I will always use this, no matter what anyone thinks. And to those people who tell me I have no life, well to quote a classic, "Bite me".