I spend a lot of time online and have done for years and over that time many happy, sad, odd, nasty, fantastic things have happened to me online and off. This blog is about all of that and more.
Hey thanks for checking out my little blog. A bit about me: I'm a web designer for a Catholic Hospital
in Nebraska. I love my job and it's allowed me to learn so much about design and code etc etc. all at their expense, not mine, hehehe.
I have a daughter, she's nearly 12 and the pride of my life. You can check out her website at Sweetiepete.com.
She loves it when people sign her guestbook :) That's enough for this space. If you want to know more, read the blogs! :)
I really should go to bed. But I don't want to sleep. I've been trying to get some stuff ready for a garage sale tomorrow and in doing so, I've found a lot of my mother's pictures and my father's personal effects. I really miss them. My aunt's been taken to hospital again tonight, we think because of more complications from cancer. She's been battling it for fifteen years and I think she's finally had enough. I'm afraid if I go to bed now my mind will just churn over and over with how much I miss my parents and what if this is the last time my aunt goes to the hospital.
Oh it's just too depressing and doesn't have much to do with the Internet. My mom's website is still up at geocities. http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/6176/ if my little audience wants to peruse. I'm looking at it now and I want to cry. I think my next project will be to rescue those pages from geocities and turn them into another site on my own server for her. The banner ads are doing my head in.
Anyway. I do need to get up early. Off I go, good night.
I'm having a blah day on the net today. Ever have those? When there's almost too many things you want to do so you end up trying to work out where to start and nothing sound good and when you DO decide to work on something, your password won't work or something silly that prevents you from doing it. I'm having a day like that. I've got to update news releases on my hospital site, but for some reason my password/username has gone invalid since an upgrade last week. I wanted to try and teach myself how to create cool popup windows (not for advertising - I hate those things) for images I want to display on our secondary site. I can't get my head around it. Last night I began working with Macromedia Flash and damn it's hard. I wonder if there's a way I can take a course or something in it through the hospital.
Hmmmm...
All is quiet on the TCZ/Placebo front. I've delayed the release of the TCZ Digest until June. There are just too many people away studying for exams and whatnot and I can't get them to turn in articles. Sometime I feel like it will never get off the ground again. I tried it a little different this time, in that I gave the editors for each section almost total freedom to hire/fire staff, come up with their own content and style etc. but I've only got three editors and none of them have had much luck getting their staff to write anything. Maybe I should just chuck it in altogether. I haven't decided yet. Truth be told I've not had a lot of time for TCZ lately. I used to devote loads of time to it but lately, when I read the BBS about problem users, whiny users, users who continually cause problems, my mind just goes 'ugh' and I log out. At this point in time I'd rather devote most of my time to the fan section of the Placebo site. It's been loads of fun so far. Maybe my interests have changed now that I've learned so much about the umm, 'back end' of the Internet. Maybe I'm no longer satisfied with simple chat anymore and want to get my hands dirty designing sites and learning new techniques and software programs. I've discovered a real love for that. I wish I had Flash here at work but I'm having trouble justifying the cost to my boss :) Especially for a program I haven't learned yet.
Ah well.. I'm off to try and find something to do.
Obsession. Stalking. Psychopaths and the Net. (I know I'm scaring Shawn right now just by mentioning those two words :D). No Shawn I'm not talking about you. I've got a story about this actually, it's a few years old but I'm sure it still has some relevancy today.
We had a user on TCZ several years ago who'd been there quite some time and she had a lot of friends. Including myself. In fact I considered myself a very good friend of hers. Eventually she got involved in a net fling that didn't end well. A few days after they broke up I received a phone call from a woman claiming to be her sister, and she was telling me that my friend had killed herself. Now, of course I was shocked. This woman was telling me my friend had left only one written line as a note and she couldn't make sense of it. 'Without Love there can be no life'. I immediately thought about her breakup and I told this woman I would log on and try to speak with the guy involved. To make a long story short, this woman logged onto TCZ and as we talked with her we realised something wasn't quite right with her story. Phone calls were made to the Coroner's office where my friend lives, we spoke to the police there, even had them go out to her house. No such person even lived there. My friend had scammed us all. She wasn't dead, instead she was only making some twisted play for attention. A lot of us felt mighty betrayed after that.
It's hard to bring yourself to trust people you meet on the Net. And I'm sure I've been a little on the stupid side in meeting people. Especially guys (as my family tells me quite often). But after a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that for the most part, the Internet is a great place socially. You may come across the individual who discovers he/she can use it to deceive people or just use it to be someone they're not. But that can happen in real life aswell. You have serial killers, drug addicts, petty thieves, gigolos and what have you even without logging on. But I think caution should be exercised, especially if you're underage (here comes my parental lecture). Parents need to watch their children closely on the Net. Another user on TCZ was caught pretending to be female and getting gullible guys to fall for "her" and send "her" money and gifts.
I'm not quite sure where I'm going with thi, I'm a little tired atm... I guess I'm saying that there are some crazy people online... and those are the only stories you'll hear about on the news. But it's the same irl. Crazy people stalking celebs, sexually perverse priests molesting kids, schizophrenic housewives drowning her children... The Internet mirrors reality in a way. Hmmm.. I might have to come back to this, I'm not concentrating... see you tomorrow.
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