Darkest Suburbia...and Beyond!

....well, electronically speaking, at least.

My virtual house at lonepenman.net is changing Web hosts, and one of the artifacts of this process is that email will evidently go down for a (hopefully brief) period while the pixels are migrating from one host to the other.  I should still be reachable here at DW or via phone/text for those with the relevant numbers in the interval.  (I have been contemplating this for awhile now, and once the change is changed, I have plans - rather vague as yet, but still plans - to take advantage of the new quarters to move forward and perhaps expand my online presence.

You have been warned. :-)

Actually, two or three makeovers, but we'll get to that in a moment:

The least significant in absolute terms (but the one with the most immediate visible impact) is the quick cosmetic makeover I've done on my Dreamwidth journal style in the wake of recent migrations.  I'm reasonably pleased with the new look, though if something is acting peculiar as you read this on the DW side, do let me know.

The weather has also been somewhat more than usually exciting, as my more local readers are already aware; Portland has had two impressive-for-us snowstorms already this winter and the forecasters are hinting darkly at another flurry on the horizon -- which may or may not arrive just in time to strand my monthly SFnal book group in the Beaverton branch of Powell's overnight.

Then there's the bigger news: after 25 (gasp!) years in my present apartment, I am actually preparing to move to a different part of Darkest Suburbia.  A combination of factors -- a change of workplace (same job, different location), a concurrent move on my mother's part, the state of the Portland rental and housing markets, and some other familial considerations -- means that I'm about to shift status from Apartment Dweller to Condominium Resident.  This has the inevitable pluses and minuses: in absolute terms, I'll sacrifice a little bit of square footage, and the new place is a second floor unit (more stairs).  But I'll have a much larger kitchen space, the new neighborhood should be more bicycle-friendly, there's a high-grade movie theater in (longish) walking distance, and I won't need to change buses to get to the aforementioned Beaverton Powell's.

Now I just have to pack 25 years' worth of books.  And declutter.  And try to sell off a comic book collection, and etc., etc....

If I'm a little scarce online for the next few weeks, that's why.

This is a test -- no, really.

I've survived a lot of LiveJournal kerfuffles, but the latest thing with friends-page redesign seems as if it may actually be baroque enough to break the user base over there once and for all. Thus it's time to create a reserve journal Over Here in case of LJ-implosion. (That said, I'm not ready to exit LJ yet, so at least for now you'll find me both here and there.)

Over the last couple of days I've been following a virtual brush fire arising from a statement in the most recent post in LJ News -- to the extent of wading into the comment-stream in the original News post, and following the virtual bread crumbs from there into a couple of other journals.  Now the brush fire has been put out.  In the interests of signal boost, I'm reposting (by permission) the clearest statement of what is -- and isn't happening that I've seen anywhere on LJ.  Note also that, per a thread in the comments to soph 's original post (as linked and reposted below) even if an inactive account is purged under the described schema, comments and posts elsewhere made from that account should not, repeat not, be deleted from the journals and/or communities in which they appear.

Originally posted by soph at Regarding the recent news on user purging

Whoof!

After a considerable amount of tinkering and reworking, my Web page update is live.  This reflects a major site redesign; the prior iteration of the site had been created in Front Page, and updating it had become . . . complicated on the new computer.  This version was built with MS Expressions Web, and is CSS-driven, so is hopefully a lot cleaner where code is concerned.

Almost all of what was there is still there, although in a couple of cases it's moved, and a couple of pages have been renamed.  To the extent that I'm aware of external links to my pages, most of those should still work.  There are also completely new subsections devoted to my published and forthcoming stories.  One further side effect of the redesign is that there are now counters on all the subpages ("You are visitor number 4!").

I invite all and sundry to go over, look around, and let me know what works and doesn't work.

Now I just have a novelette to finish editing, two book reviews to work on, critiques to do for my writers' group, and a SFWA-committee project to complete.  Not to mention various other writing projects....

Purely a test post to see whether the image I just added to my last free-free-free userpic slot actually looks reasonable in display. [I took the original picture in the park across the street from the Kid Brother's place in Sunny Southern California this past Thanksgiving....]

Whoa; I've been on hiatus for longer than I thought.

There may be a small flurry of posts over the next short while, as I gather thoughts on various subjects that have arisen since I was last here, but I'll save specifics till I get there.