Real Life – The Kind Healer

Site Review and Fixes

Um, oops.

I let the auto-updater for WordPress itself just run for ages, not realizing that one of my key plugins – Jetpack – had gotten out-of-sync. Caused some wacky issues with displaying pages, as in not at all…

Everything is now current, and apparently displaying correctly. At least ‘relatively painless’ is still a thing with WordPress.

As for why I was taking a quick peek here, its two things: 1) I wanted to check a few things for self-publishing my GW2 fanfic, and 2) I thought I had made a post regarding my removal of all ‘well known’ Social Media sites (in quotes b/c I’ve seen Twitch referenced as such, as well as Youtube sometimes; I disagree). Turns out I was thinking about my use of my RL Name in some places, so at some point I actually *should* create a post about this.

Anyway. I’m liking what I see so far with the current editor, though I would like proper Footnote support. I fully expect that to be a thing in a plugin or setting someplace. So sometime next month the first Story Arc will go up here.

–TSK

Online Identity and Privacy

Every now and then, I have to bring up to someone why I would be nutty enough to post online with a RL name. My best answer so far was part of a private forum discussion; re-posting the relevant part of that here:

For the individual, I believe its up to them to make up their minds regarding anonymity. In my case, I decided some time ago to mostly register under my RL name, but in return I decided to not have any involvement in social media, and limit any other public interactions. I also usually participate in forums where there are ‘account only’ sections (such as this site), as web crawlers will be unable to archive those posts. And for more public musings, I still have my private domain/site, which I point everyone to as the replacement for said social media.

Does this allow me to control ‘the message’ completely? No, and I have no interest in doing so. Not if I want to keep my sanity anyway. It does allow some control over what is associated with me, which is enough for my needs.

But I also do not recommend doing what I did without thinking through its implications.

This came up recently due to pointing a few folks to my site while under a different name – the one this site is named for. But in reality, Sungak has been with me for so long, that I consider him as much of a RL name as the actual one.

As an identity, Sungak isn’t a bad choice. In fact, he was originally played as an simpler version of myself, which allowed me to learn and grow socially in a safe manner. But he eventually became much more than that. He became a goal of sorts to strive for, and (in turn) an extension of myself. At certain points of my life, he’s even become an anchor of sanity when everything else wants to break me down mentally. Its an interesting symbiosis really.

As for his ‘age,’ I ran a few numbers and realized he’s nearly as old as I was when 9/11 happened. He’s certainly been around for more than half my life now, which would explain how comfortable I am shifting between the two (if they even are different people at this point). I really do need to listen to that part of me more often, as well; sometimes, I wonder if the Holy Spirit has taken up residence there, guiding me along a safe path. *shrug* I’ll never know, I suppose.

Another Year, Another Post

Well, 2012 was interesting to say the least.

The biggest thing? A late storm named Sandy was a real head-cracker over here, unfortunately – a visit to Hoboken today showed that some places are still rebuilding.

The second biggest? I got to shut down a 65 TB disk array that I helped bring online 6.5 years ago. Somewhat bittersweet actually, but its work so that’s all I’m saying.

In the ‘fun’ list is a new game – Guild Wars 2, an MMO. While I had promised myself that I’d never go back to online gaming after Eve, overall I’m glad that I poked my nose into this one; It’s certainly casual friendly – with the right friends anyway. The only problem I’m having now is not directly game related – Certain class play styles are not very good for my damaged wrists, so I’m experimenting with most of them to see what will work safely. At the moment I’ve found two, which is good.

My next personal project will be the next PC. Stats will go up once I’ve got it stable, but I already have the parts here. Hopefully I’ll have things working this week.

Update – Fall 2012

So, It’s just over a year since last major update, where Irene was about to visit. Well, I ended up sleeping through it. *chuckle* The only major aftermath was a couple of mice that decided to snoop around my PC down here in the basement, but I did not know about that until I came back from a Labor Day vacation. Argh.

Anyway, the rest of 2011 was reasonable, but ‘Snowtober’ (a major snowfall around Halloween) was interesting, to say the least. I was on-call during that too, and ended up on two different conference calls from home. Thankfully (and despite so many trees around the house) the Internet link has stayed up.

This year has been an interesting one so far, mostly around work. I’ve been extremely busy, and yet I’m also very happy about it (due to some of the projects I’m finally able to take care of). There’s been some down moments, as always, but I promised not to make this site about work, and that’s all I’ll say about it for now.

Of course, it is also a few days to 9/11 again. I’m beginning to detect the tension that happens around this time, but it’s not nearly as bad as last year. And someone, earlier this year, gave me some suggestions about how to cope with that – suggestions that really have helped.

Overall, an interesting year. And I’ve not even mentioned Eve Online yet (in short? – I finally left it). Probably in a later post…

Painless, Pt 2

Well, deciding to move the wordpress site back to my web ‘root’ (where it should have been in the first place) has been a bit of a pain after all. Despite making all kinds of redirect setups, MystBlogs does not seem to syndicate the site anymore. And of course I’m finding a lot of external and internal linking that needs correcting (as the fresh import has changed the post URL structure). Not a big deal yet, I’m working through all that.

One nice thing so far is how few plugins I need now, in comparison to what I used to have. This new ‘Jetpack’ thing that WP included in the install has served a number of my needs, though I’ve disabled about half the features anyway. :p Three ‘quickie’ plugins used to modify comment/trackback etc behavior ended up in Core. So at minimum I’ve only needed to add in Bad Behavior so far (Akismet spam protection also came installed).

One new thing I did add is something to manage the Redirect Hell I’m in now. It’s probably going to end up part of my main plugin list, until things cool down in a year or so. I’m hoping Google etc will re-scan the site and re-hash everything in the new format soonish.

–TSK