The Belo Company, parent of the ProJo, is now threatening to sue a small website outside of Dallas for "deep linking," i.e., linking to specific stories on the website of the Dallas Morning News instead of the DMN's main page. The ProJo has the same linking policy on their page, so they may well start doing the same thing. On the other hand, I kind of suspect not because they have certainly had no public problem with the deep links on BuddyCianci.com. Who could resist such a circus anyway? Nonetheless, Belo's threats are chilling and annoying as hell anyway. People would be more apt to link to their main page if navigation didn't stink so bad. It's been weeks since the ProJo redesign, and they still have multiple broken links.

I caught a huge break: my former email provider came back online, so I was able to retrieve all my mail and set forwarding. They claim there are no further outages foreseen, but I don't trust that and need an easier to remember address anyway, so I'm making the switch. I will make a significant donation anyway to help them through their problems and as gratitude for all they've given me, but I just can't risk a catastrophe like that again. Anyway, I was lucky to be able to get my mail, but unfortunately we were not able to convince the POP mail thingy to retrieve mail that had already been marked read. That meant I had to process about 600 messages by hand (mostly saving as text files on the home computer.) This took hours and was totally exhausting. It's not even completely done because I dumped all the messages in one folder on my desktop instead of filing them in more logical places, and some I just forwarded to my webmail address to deal with later. But that will all keep. I was so exhausted that I slept more than 12 hours afterwards. Then I had to catch up on all the news reading and tv viewing the next day. Now I just owe email to one other person and I'll largely be caught up. So tired.

Oh yeah, I heard back from the friend whose minister I wrote to track down. She had moved almost all the way across the country and is in a totally different life situation. Quite a story she had to tell, too, although I cannot share it here. The exchange made me realize that, alas, it's probably good we weren't in touch those years because I think I would have just dragged her down further. A little bit vice versa too, but she was having such a terrible time that I fear it might have been really, really destructive for her. I hate to think I would have that effect on someone, but I'm calling it as I see it, and in that case, it's what I see. So it's just good that it didn't happen and that we can now be glad to be in touch again.
posted by Mad Anne Rackham at 8:12 AM

Some doofus running for office in Alabama wants to tax science fiction books to help fund NASA. No wry comment necessary from me--this speaks for itself.
posted by Mad Anne Rackham at 10:32 PM

For some reason (probably related to the recent necessity of changing email addresses), I felt compelled tonight to try to track down an old friend whom I've not been in touch with since 1997. We didn't have a falling out; we were both just in terrible places in our lives back then and just didn't stay in touch. She was in such bad shape that she only felt strong enough to send very short emails at the time. So anyway, did some web searches, but she has a common name, so it was hard to get the right person. The only hits I got that I knew were definitely her were from 1996. What's interesting to me, though, was my hesitancy to write to the last email address I had for her. Why? Because she shared the address with her partner, and I have this weird fear that maybe they had a terrible breakup and the partner would be pissed to get mail from someone looking for her. Isn't that just stupid? The chances of that being the case are very slim (not necessarily the chances of a breakup, but of one that terrible), and yet here I am afraid of the imagined wrath of a stranger (never met the partner.) The other thing I am afraid of is that my friend might be dead. This is also not particularly likely even though she was extremely depressed the last time we were in touch. I think I can handle the news if she is dead (I've certainly been through that before), but I wouldn't want to upset the partner by emailing a query out of the blue like that. So I took a course of action I think is safer and emailed the church that she was involved with instead. I'm hoping for the best. She used to say that I had this way of reappearing in her life at just the right time, so maybe this will be one of those cases.

I outfoxed a lying politician this weekend. I'm sworn to secrecy about it, but celebrate with me that my doing a reporter's job for him paid off. Those who live here will guess correctly whom I'm talking about when I say that his pettiness just gets more and more shameless. Luckily more and more people are on to his game.
posted by Mad Anne Rackham at 6:58 AM