Everyone knows that I have archives from 2000 that I need to get back on the web. The sad thing is, they were originally generated by Blogger and then later on GreyMatter. I have them in HTML format, but the HTML is for Mac OS 9, and virtually impossible to read via modern browsers.
If anyone can fix these archives to a MovableType/WordPress .xml importable format, I’ll gladly buy you a 1 year paid account, extension, or PayPal you $20. I just can’t get the files to cooperate and I wanted to reupload my 2000/2001 entries.
Also, if I were my 2002/2008 entries, where would I have saved them???? Snow Leopard has a build like Windows and I don’t know where the default save folder is. 
It’s that time of year again. Harvest Moon time. It’s this Sunday starting at 7pm. There’s always a big feast and people gather to see what the others have put their souls into this past year. My contribution, or at least what I want to contribute is a journal that I have been keeping since February. I’m working hard to finish the last twenty or so pages.
I also seemed to have fixed my MacBook Pro. I was getting that dreaded -36 error when I tried to re-install my Sims 2 game. I deleted everything and I’m basically starting over from scratch. I’m sure there’s other ways to get around that, but right now I didn’t want to mess around with it. I’m purging the hard drive today and maybe by tomorrow things will be back to normal. Whatever normal is.
About Harvest Moon. Yes, it’s a Pagan holiday that is celebrated much like Halloween was back in the early days. No, I don’t worship Satan, there’s no intentional blood shed, it’s a kid-friendly soul celebration of the covens. It’s no more an evil get-together than Christmas is. It’s 100% based on love and peace and I enjoy it every year. People from all walks of life are welcome as long as they attend peacefully. People of all religions attend and are welcome. It’s kind of like a crafts fair that starts off with a big meal. It’s the celebration of the first full moon of the fall harvest, lasting usually about three hours, then we leave. Yes, it’s usually held outside near the lake, but that is only because we’re celebrating the fullness of the moon. Yes, sometimes people bring baby rats to the Harvest Moon, but they are weened and offered as pets. Yes, some people bring other pets to the Harvest Moon. It’s a family celebration, and I took Ziggy last year.
Chloe wants some fish, so I might invest in getting some pet gold fish at the Harvest Moon; the animals offered there are so friendly and nice. They’re bred for pets. We have an aquarium just sitting here bubbling with no fish in it. It serves as a water dish for spiders, flies and mosquitoes.
Back to the homework and the writing.
After an extended conversation with my friend who hosts me, and some serious thought, I’ve decided that come October 5th, I will no longer be an active member of EntreCard. I stuck with it for over a year and got over 100,000 hits because of their service. It was a good idea in the beginning, but now it’s all about the All Mighty Dollar and I’m not about selling out. Especially if I can’t sell my own unique creations on my own space, I’m not going to allow others to resell my webspace.
I welcome everyone from EntreCard to still visit my site. I will faithfully drop until the eve of October 4th (for some reason my drop count resets at 11pm). I will continue to have the widget on my sites until all credit ADs have been shown. I assume that because I will no longer be dropping every night my credit count will not increase. I will decline any ADs placed after 11pm Central time today.
In lieu of EntreCard, I propose we do a blog crew or a WebRing of ex-EntreCard members where we actually surf the ring and comment on each other’s posts daily or weekly. Maybe we can do link exchanges. I suck at organising things like this, so I’ll just put the idea out there on the table and let the others who are in the same boat as I am do the work. I know I will lose many hits, backing away from EntreCard, but I cannot stand by a company that has lost insight to what blogging is originally about and risk a friendship that I have held dear in my heart since 1990. I just can’t ask Josh to allow me to break the rules when others cannot simply because he is my friend. When he told me he’d let me break the rules because I’m me, my heart broke. I felt like I was using my friend to stay a part of something that doesn’t care about me as a human. I also know that my content isn’t good enough to have daily visitors who aren’t dropping for that one, lousy EntreCard credit. That’s ok too. No hard feelings.
I love all the comments and emails I have gotten because of EntreCard. I know that I have touched many lives through my blog and it was because of EC that my words were read. I appreciate that. Maybe, someday, if EntreCard is no longer driven by money, I will return to them. I don’t condone or oppose anyone who chooses to stay with them. That is your decision, and it doesn’t affect me in anyway. I am leaving because my budget tells me to stay with my current host and my heart tells me that I shouldn’t ask a friend to break the rules for me because we’re friends. I believe in equality and this was my test in equality.
Good luck in whatever you choose to do. As for what will occupy my time that was once spent dropping cards? Well, I have ten Pharm 3 homework questions, nasty essay questions that can’t be answered with simple math or single-word answers that aren’t going to do themselves, so I’d better get on that! They’re due Wednesday! 
Note: This entry repeats at my other blog.
Don't Take Offence At My Innuendoes
I was plagued with back pain last night. It started slow and worked back up to a throb. I had a small idea from a friend online, and I called the dog over to the bedside to get in the bed. “Uh-uh. I don’t want that dog in the bed. I just changed the sheets last week,” Dennis said. “You did not,” I replied. “I did.” No sense in arguing with him. A few minutes later, he went to the bathroom. I heard the water run into the bath tub. I called the dog over to the bed and patted the space behind me. She climbed in the bed and laid down next to my shoulders. “Ziggy…Lower, come on, hit that sweet spot….” she curled up in the small of my back. “Longer… all the way…” she stretched out so we were spine to spine. “Oh, good dog! Oh that feels good! You are such a good dog!”
The bathroom door swung open. Dennis stuck his head out. “What’s going on in there?” he asked. I grinned. “Dog wanted in the bed.” “Are you sure that’s all she wanted?” he asked. Pervert. 
The second one happened in class today. I took one of the Go-Gurts to class with me to eat. When I tore it open, I didn’t get it quite open, and I didn’t want to have to keep ripping it because I knew I’d make a mess. So I did the intelligent thing: Sucked on the flimsy wrapper. Professor Sal was lecturing us on the shitty test results we had and I started massaging the end of the Go-Gurt package. I didn’t think anything would happen, just then the plastic broke and yogurt squirted so hard in my mouth it came out my nose and I started coughing over it. Everyone in the classroom burst out laughing. Including Professor Sal.
Digging Up Bones
In connection to yesterday’s post, I’d like to say that shortly after I made the post, I commented on Entrecard’s entry about the forced paid ADs. It’s been over 24 hours and my comment was not approved. I didn’t get nasty, I just put in a different perspective: I wouldn’t mind paying the $50 if it was a permanent solution to their bouts of temporary insanity. And I was serious. If it meant that I didn’t have to worry about what ADs they were taking in, or what people were essentially buying space off of my space that I am not in a reseller agreement with, I’d gladly open up PayPal or drive down to the store to purchase a money order right this instant and give them the money. But if I’m going to have to do it again next year? No thanks. Not worth it.
However, since I’m not deemed “worthy” enough to have a stupid comment appear on their site (again, their choice), I won’t pay jack to them now. Even if they offered me 100% of my profits of paid ADs.
There is a good argument in the comments there that I would love to participate in, but I seem to be banned and I can’t get a new IP from my WiFi station and I refuse to do it from my school (people who ban IPs are the type who tend to whine to Universities and businesses that said person was banned from their home IP because they offered the ‘victim’ naughty pictures of little children). The argument that what EntreCard is doing isn’t free on their part. No kidding. Rackspace isn’t free. Essentially, what we’re doing when we have the code on our sites is stealing their bandwidth because we’re hotlinking the java script from our blogs. I load about 600 blogs on EC per day. I get about 300 hits per day. That’s nearly 1000 hits that I am responsible for. Imagine all the users loading sites. EntreCard must get about 1000 hits per minute. And that, my friends, isn’t cheap.
On the other hand, this is something EntreCard should have been able to foresee in the future. Back in the early days of blogging, many people boosted their PageRank and plumped their hits with RingSurf and WebRing. Again, free services that we mooched the java script source from. But I could go to either of those sites now and see that they’re still free, even though the fad of belonging to the Webloggers’ WebRing and the Blogs By Women WebRing is not the ‘in’ thing to display on your blog’s front page anymore.
So why stay at EntreCard? Clearly I’ve been sent to the corner (Hey Turnip! Thanks for keeping the quiet room warm for me!!) and I’m on thin ice. I stay with them because I need the audience. How many people would regularly visit my blog without the aid of that little widget? I tried the Adgetize, but I just don’t get it and I can’t get the code to show up here on my site anyway. So until the next fad in getting hits and exposure on my blog comes up, I’m stuck with EC.
I was also very serious about paying the one time fee of $50 to permanently ease my mind about ADs. See, back in 2003 I paid $100 to the place that hosts my journal so I could have all the paid features and not have to worry about losing my account (other than through suspension). Sure enough, three years later, they put ADs on all the basic accounts. Then they made Plus accounts that had ADs on them. With a permanent account, as long as I am logged in, I will never see these ADs. Last year, my husband got a permanent account for $175. He didn’t mind paying that price at all. So yes, I’d have really go fourth and sent EC the money, but they didn’t want to hear the voice of reason.
In following trends here, I’m going to blog about EntreCard once again.
For, they’re now forcing paid ads on us. That wouldn’t be so bad, but their opt-out will cost you $50 per year. Whoa. If that was a one-time-fee, a permanent solution for their temporary insanity episodes, I’d go for it. Then when EntreCard would have these bi-polar episodes, I could just shrug and know it didn’t apply to me. $50 isn’t a small fee for some people. If it were, they probably wouldn’t be hosted on WordPress.com or blogspot.com. After all, my hosting for this site is $60 per year.
That brings me to why I am anti-paid ads.
About ten years ago, when I agreed to my hosting, I promised not to do paid-anything on it. My hosts (and I) believe that once someone starts accepting money to do something they once enjoyed or did for free, it no longer is good. It stops being done well and enjoyed and becomes a chore. I’m not on a reseller account, so I can’t have Google ads, or any pay-per-click ad on my blog. I can’t do PayPerPost (thank GOD–PayPerPost blogs seem forced. Unnatural). I can’t even have a PayPal button for cash donations on my site or peddle my handwriting fonts anymore. There’s a reason for that. My hosts (and I) believe that paid blogging is unnatural and seems forced. I agreed to this back in 2002 and I still uphold that attitude.
I wonder what makes EntreCard need this money so badly. Graham bought all the EntreCard domain extensions from GoDaddy.com two years ago for 2-4 years. The .biz is expiring next week. However, he owns 150 domains and the current EntreCard is hosted on Nettica.com, which going with GoDaddy proved to be a smart move because Nettica.com doesn’t have the best prices in the world. Dreamhost.com has a better pricing option and is a better host for small businesses trying to get off the ground.
So why the drama?
PageRank.
It has to be. Whenever EntreCard pisses off its massive user base, dozens of people blog about it, comment about it, and it usually happens around the time Google is crawling pages. It’s a great marketing scheme. Or it would be. If EntreCard was a small, personal site and not something that is supposed to be catering to the blogging community. EntreCard should be attempting to grow via word-of-mouth, not by PageRank. PageRank isn’t everything, but it does tend to grow when people blog positively about a site or service. All these changes, they’re free advertisement for EntreCard. Think about it. If they said they were going to kick off everyone on Blogspot, you’d better believe everyone on Blogspot would post about it. And who owns Blogspot now? Google. What blogs do Google crawl first now? Blogspot. Perfect marketing strategies. Except if they piss off the entire world, I don’t know who is going to continue to use their services.
My life is slowly going back to normal.
I was able to check the mail today. I was able to pay the credit card bill today. I was able to clean the pet cage today. I was able to sit upright without much pain. I don’t know what relieved my pain, but I’m glad that it’s gone. I’m glad that I don’t have to over dose on pills just to be able to sleep through the night. It was good to just be able to go to sleep and wake up in the morning due to the dog shifting around in the bed and not a pain in my legs and back.
I think tomorrow I will ask if I can go to the coffee shop. I feel better. I want to get well. I need to be able to move about again and not be stuck in bed crying over pain that can’t be solved.
Thank you to everyone who wished me well when I was hurting. It means a lot to me, even though I can’t reply to all the comments and emails individually. Love you all. Tomorrow’s gonna be a better day! <3
A Little Selfish
While we were out looking at some things today, I mentioned to Dennis that I deserved a watch I seen in the store display. He playfully asked me why and I said it was because of all the stuff I had done for him recently. We laughed back and fourth for a little while when I got a text message from his brother. I texted back why he didn’t contact his “love”. He replied to me that she wouldn’t have seen the humor in what happened between Dennis and I and she would have just threatened suicide or to leave him if he didn’t buy her the watch.
Sometimes I feel bad for my brother-in-law. Then I remember all the things he’s done to me, and I don’t feel so bad anymore.
Last, I think my entries from nuclear-winter.nu are permanently gone. I’ve searched my March 2009 disc and several others. I’ll look more this week end, but it looks like the entries are gone. Sorry. I can’t begin to re-write years worth of entries and I don’t know if things can be recovered from a server or not. Doubtful. Oh well. Tomorrow’s gonna be another day.
Jamie aka: The being known as Wonder Girl, 30, mother of four, wife to one, she is a senior biomedicine student who is learning to fit in in the world around her. After nearly three decades on this planet, she still doesn't know where she belongs. Best friend of Matt, sarcastic, spoiled, apathetic, kutie brat, babe. Just your average woman, living in a not-so-average world, surviving by her incredible super power of being able to see right through you while
accomplishing more tasks than you ever thought imaginable. She is the being known as Wonder Girl and she is speaking, I believe. More? Aren't you brave!
