I must've done something right, because I've been summoned to the second stage security check-thingy. In the Qiriya base, no less (central Tel-Aviv, more or less the Israeli equivalent to the Pentagon). No one can tell me what this is all about of course, and I'm nervous. But, as far as getting the good position, this is definitely a Good Thing, or so I hope. BTW, they have the URL of this page. Was that a mistake?

I have to share this with you: we had rain today! Now, understand, it's the 15th of August, Israel. Rain. This is unheard of, it's insane. The weather has truly gone mad. Oh, and that poor elephant. :(

RJA emailed me and I was able to help her a bit with the archives template (after struggling with my highly irregular archive template for this blog, I feel I'm fairly knowledgeable in this). It feels so good knowing I've learned something for being able to do stuff and help people and not just for the bragging rights.

BTW, I feel like I should review the new SQ v3 1.0.1 engine, but there's little I have to say. It seems very nice, though I would've changed some stuff layout-wise. Forced me to reconsider some of my own work.

Am still pondering on the idea of compressed chapter transfer, but it looks like the viewer must be made in Java for such a thing to work, which makes the page (applet, rather) too "heavy" for my taste. But the idea of a JS php-generated navigation system is getting along nicely. Makes for fast refreshing and lower server load (also conserves bandwidth) so I think I'll use it.

Would've liked to host actual content myself, in parsed form and possibly even compressed (just look at what solid rar3 can do to html files!), but it appears I will never posses the storage and bandwidth capacity. I wonder who pays SQ's and FA's bills. I know RL finances are not a popular topic in the fandom, but the bottom line is: someone has to pay real money for the sandbox. A&Z don't sound like two girls who can spend a fortune on hosting fees...

Am considering totally abolishing first person pronouns, and not for bandwidth considerations. Also am beginning to seriously consider a way to have both singular and plural second person pronouns like in all normal languages. Showing respect by using plural instead of singular is one thing, but not being able to make the distinction is quite another. Though, I really don't fancy using y'all...

Am going to further restrict anti-spam filter on the hotmail account, so please use the other address if you don't want to wait while I fetch your mail out of the bulk mail folder.

Have considered using PGP, but have decided is pointless since most correspondences are not geeky enough to bother with it.

Edit:Apparently I wanted to design the perfect fanfic archive site to pitch it to various folks (for free). I have developed javascript that generated nice TOC pages and navigation links in a layer that hovers at the top of the view port. It used anchor names of URLs to store data in bookmarks and was supposed to be generated using php from a database, though the backend was never developed. The realization that I don't want to store the fic itself but only the metadata evolved into the idea of crawling fic metadata from various archives into a single database to search for fics fandom-wide.

And the Zen lesson for today is: if it's working - don't fix it.