The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dori:

Jim @ 123: sorry about that...

Oddly enough, even though it doesn't show up here, it does show up in the list when I view all my comments.

(My last comment doesn't appear to have shown up after a few hours, so I'm trying again with less HTML. Apologies if it gets double posted.)

"Creative writers," here's your chance at a "big break":

http://newyork.craigslist.org/que/wrg/1304063534.html

snort

Good thoughts and best wishes from us here on the other side of the country. Tom's heart attack was 13 years ago (story at Tales of the Heart), and he's still around, so I'm sure you'll be fine.

Remember, the goal is not for you to be bored, but for the hospital staff and doctors to be bored--that's when you know that you're doing fine and you'll be sent home shortly. I know it's not in character, but please, try as hard as you can to make them find you uninteresting!

Patrick, our best to you as well...

An easy question for this crowd: who here does not desperately want to see the Whedon/Davies crossover show, Dr. Who-rrible?

(ok, I mostly just want to see the John Barrowman & Neil Patrick Harris duet)

Rikibeth, @ #7:

I think I tried to put 1994's crop of Olympic skaters into the Les Mis roles, too. I wanted to see those routines.

I once told someone that they'd never truly understand Les Misérables until they saw it in the original Klingon.

Humans thinking that they can make up a story about honor? Pah! It must have been Klingon.

Are the threads in further fear of collapsing if I point out that Randall Munroe also created LimerickDB.com?

Craig, @445:

I got a 2:00 am call to come in and fix the nightly accounting and general/ledger batch cycle. 23 programs.

Oof, I was thinking it might just have been me. Back then I was also working for a Big Financial Institution, but in a small subsidiary that wrote software for lots of small financial institutions. We knew in advance that we were going to run into trouble with our date routines, so we tried to fix everything ahead of time. Thankfully, the only ones that got missed (iirc) were on a few reports.

The good news was that it gave us a real heads-up about Y2K, and with sufficient time to prepare.

Michael, @419:

I still see the occasional site with a date at the top that now says, e.g. "June 18, 108", and I laugh a private laugh to myself.

Try copy/pasting this into your browser's address bar:

        javascript:alert(new Date().getYear())

hit return, and you'll see why so many sites still do that.

Well-behaved scripts use "getFullYear" now.

(and in a similar vein: am I the only person here who can immediately remember—and not in a good way—that 16 September 1989 was the 32768th day of the 20th century?)

Paula, @361:

But, what is a "lede"? I've never seen the term before, I've seen "lead," but can not recalled ever having seen "lede" used to refer to the start of an article before.

It's common journalist jargon. For other examples, see Language Log: Hed, dek, lede, graf, tk: live with it and Journalism Slang - How to Talk Like a Reporter.

Xopher, @244:

It's appalling what your assumptions are. When we kick in money to help someone, it's usually a gift, not a loan. That said, I'm unaware of the case you talk about, so maybe they really were asking for investors, but there's nothing in what you say here to indicate that that's the case.

An archive of the original call for donations can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20010202135500/http://www.blogger.com/server_fund.pyra. And reading that moves me to fix a minor mistake I made earlier; when I said. "I never saw anything in return for my donations," I'd forgotten that I did indeed get a few stickers, as promised.

Seth, @280:

There's a list of MBA members. Many are approachable to the writers of this blog. Is it SO HARD to ask privately to some of them "What's this MBA - is it for real? And who is this Cox guy, is he legit?" before dumping this stuff all over the place?

Until you posted a link (@294), I hadn't been able to find any such list—and I'd looked. So, I went for my next choice: compare what's being said here to things that I know to be true from personal experience. This is where Mr. Cox (as I said @170) went 0 for 2.

In his response to me (@171), he was supercilious, patronizing, and, well, just plain rude.

Now, if I'd seen the list first, or been approached to join by someone I knew (and I know several people on that list), I'd have a much more favorable opinion of the MBA. In fact, I probably would have been happy to send in my check or give my credit card.

But right now, his response to me leads me to believe that his negotiation skills also leave something to be desired. I don't want my representative at the table to be someone who's that arrogant and contemptuous of others. And if he's hoping to re-start the MBA, shouldn't working with bloggers be a higher priority than fussing about who is "three times better"?

Robert Cox, @150:

It was Dan who introduced me to the blogging world through which I came to read, know or email with some early bloggers like Dave Winer and Evan Williams of Pyra Labs. Quite frankly I did not "get" blogging at the time and when Dan pitched me and others on helping Evan pay his bills by tossing him some money I very foolishly declined. I think the folks who did give him money made out OK later ;-)

Speaking as one of the people who did donate to Pyra to help pay the bills way back when, the answer is "No." I never saw anything in return for my donations (in particular, no tech support), so we ended up moving our blog to MT after about 3 years with Blogger.

Robert Cox, @154:

I was in the room at Stanford Law School when Dave and Adam debuted that thing they called "podcasting".

And when was that? My guess is that you're referring to BloggerCon III in November 2004, which I also attended. Podcasting didn't debut there by any stretch of the imagination! As noted here, there were over 100K hits on Google for "podcasts" as of October 2004.

OTOH, maybe podcasting was new to you at BloggerCon, but to those of us who'd been blogging for over five years, it was old hat.

I can't speak so precisely about the rest of what you're saying, and these are minor points, but it does put you at 0 for 2 for those things I know about personally.

Kathryn @66:

Tom and I will be at SxSW Interactive Friday-Wednesday. We're staying at the Hampton, and we'll be speaking at 3:30pm on Saturday (actually, we'll be doing a lot of speaking throughout the conference, but that's the time we're officially Speaking).

Anyone else?

I presume you're thinking of things to take for yourself

Nah, this is all stuff for the patient. There's a lot of hurry up and wait involved in hospital visits (even those that start with an ambulance) in my experience and I think it's handy to have distractions like music and reading material available to him.

The spouse will gave everything he needs provided, including the big mug of ice water with straw, if ice water is on his allowance list.

Sadly, no. Well, at least not the last time he was admitted. He was allowed ice water, and the nurses were fine with bringing it to him in small cups and helping him drink it--when they had the time. However, the big cups they had were too heavy for him to drink on his own (septic shock left him extremely weak), and they didn't have any alternatives.

I went digging in a cabinet at home and found an old thermos mug with a lid, handle, and plastic straw from a previous hospital visit. Every nurse who came in the room looked at it with envy and reminisced about how they used to have those, pre-cutbacks.

If I filled it half-full with ice water, he could just barely hold it, and it helped keep him hydrated. I think the nurses appreciated that they didn't need to wonder every time his buzzer sounded if he was just thirsty or if it was something more urgent.

Tangential to the above, and possibly a request for a future post...

I've lived in California my entire life, and I've never (yet, and thankfully!) needed a go-bag. What I have needed is an "I've called 911 and the EMTs are on their way; what should I pack for you to take to the hospital?" list.

Assuming that you're not the person in need and that the person in need doesn't need your full attention, what do you bring along? At that point, it would be useful for me to have a printed list, because packing is not the top-most thing on my mind right then.

Offhand, here's mine:

• wallet (with insurance card)
• cell phone (with family numbers + doctors names and numbers already entered)
• all prescription drugs currently being taken (just pack the entire bottle)
• iPod + headphones
• reading material (Analog/Asimovs works well for this)
• bag that's large enough to carry the clothes that are coming off

If I know he'll be admitted and staying at least overnight:

• BiPap and battery (yes, this is my-husband-centric; feel free to put your own SO's needs here)
• slippers and/or shower sandals
• sweat shirt and sweat pants (even if they're just to wear home)
• closed drinking mug with straw
• earplugs
• eyeshades

What else ought to be on here?

Sarah @ 17: are you thinking of Cold Missouri Waters? If so, it's about the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana (the same one Eric @ 6 mentioned).

Another follow-up letter, but this one is from Chris Burgess, the general manager of Leading Edge Books (Australia's largest buying group of independent booksellers, with more than 180 members).

You know you have to read it when it contains bits like:

- All rebates are paid on a daily basis for ever and ever amen. You must ensure that the needle (provided) is inserted into your vein and a quart of your blood is received by us by the 7th of the month following the preceding month (which also follows the preceding month) . Any blood not received by this date will attract a daily 5% interest charge, payable in flesh.

Flippanter @109: I'd always hoped that the <fe> tag would catch on, and your original post was a perfect example of why.

Lila @121: I lived in a gated community back in the 90s. My husband (then-boyfriend) had a heart attack and I called to get an ambulance. As soon as I hung up the phone with 911, I called the front gate to tell them that the EMTs were on their way. They asked, "Should we let them in?"

I guess that they're supposed to ask that, but still...

Why I chose a gated community is covered in much of these comments. We lived there while the kid was ages 6-11, when I thought he should be able to run wild, but actually letting him do so would be considered child endangerment. Inside a gated community, though, it's considered okay to let your kid ride his bike by himself or be out until dinner time (gasp!). It was the most freedom I could actually give him at the time, and I don't regret it at all.

For those curious about that LJ post, a cached version can be read here. Unfortunately, all its links are to other LJ sites (i.e., they're unavailable as well), but it may be better than nothing.

Kathryn @ 18: ditto*, ditto**, and ditto***. </aol>

----

* I went in 2003. And you?
** Or more precisely, I'm going to my first in 2 weeks.
*** That ache is particularly frustrating to me given that I'm only about ten miles due north of the campus. I know there's cool people coming to my neck of the woods and they're just over there...

Teresa's at Foo? That means she's only about 10-20 miles or so away from me!

If she feels a need to briefly escape the Web 2.0 vortex of coolness, we'd be happy to swing by and and pick her up--just let me know.

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