A certain amount of unfriendliness will be tolerated here. I just remove unfriendly posts and issue occasional warnings and explanations. But willfully pursuing another poster here with an obvious intent to cause harm will not be tolerated. Two people tonight went over the line and their accounts have been suspended. These same two have done this before and undoubtedly, if I were to reinstate their accounts, would do so again.

A peculiar noise woke me this morning -- the sound of snow sliding off the carport roof. We had about two inches of snow last night. It's bright and sunny now and well above freezing so the fluffy white stuff is not going to last till noon but I'm sure the people in the ski resorts on the mountains would rather have it up there than down here. :)

Hugs,
Erin

And remember, this is Spring Ahead night in the US and CA switches from Pacific Standard to Pacific Daylight Savings Time at 2 a.m. Sunday morning.

See you there.

Hugs,
Erin

Well, it's becoming more and more obvious that we need to upgrade to Drupal 6. We've got several Drupal 6 sites now running, Stardust is on 6. So, it's time to upgrade TopShelf.

We're going to do a dummy version first, probably this week and then later, in a week or a month when we're convinced it's going to work, take BCTS down while we do the conversion on live data.

See you there, we're going to talk about how to narrow the field of selections for the book, even though we are still accepting nominations. Also discussed will be naming some "captains" for the editing, that is people besides me to take problems to. :) Probably other subjects will come up.

Hugs,
Erin

Today we talked about editing standards and decided on Word/OpenOffice/LibreOffice as our editing platform.

The workflow will be nomination, choices and priorities, permission, conference with author, editing revisions, approval from author, final edit, proofing, layout, final approvals.

Stories that get hung up in the process will probably be allowed to slip to the next volume. We now have about 150 stories nominated, though some of them are too long. At any rate, we have no dearth of stories to go into Volume 1. :)

We had a productive but fairly technical chat meeting last night and hammered out some details of how the book will look and calculated again to be sure we can get 150,000 words into 320 pages of an 8x10 trade paperback with nice margins and typography. It is not only doable, I think it will be quite a handsome book!

A few minutes ago, Cuddles killed her toy Skunkie that I got her for Christmas. Skunkie had been on life support since Cuddles bit the squeaker out of the tail on Sunday. Now, both of the squeakers are broken and pulled out of the plush. It's the nature of dogs to kill the toys they love the best fastest. She's never killed a toy quite so quickly before, just 6 days; it usually takes more like four to six months. But she had never loved a toy quite as much as she loved Skunkie.

Skunkie is dead. Long live Wheelie, the toy that squeaks AND rolls like a wheel!

We've got rain here. After two days of sunshine it's back to rain again. It's getting downright soggy. I don't live in any of the mudslide-threatened areas but there have been evacuations and road closings. Even one of the freeways was closed because of boulders loosened by the rain rolling down the mountainsides and into traffic.

My dog has food allergies. Poor Cuddles when she gets exposed to corn, soy or wheat breaks out in a rash and runs a fever. I had a solution to this problem in that for six months I fed her nothing but homemade dogfood, guaranteed not to contain any of her allergens.

At the end of that time, I started adding back in small amounts of commercial dogfood touted as not containing any of those ingredients. Slowly her allergies returned. Yesterday, I made the decision to go back to homemade dogfood, at least for another four or six months to clean her system.

Go to Stardust to see Bob's own words on this.

Hugs,
Erin

I had to make my morning fritatta with no eggs in the house this morning.

Too sick to talk about it.

- Erin

My heat came on earlier, woke me up. "What's that sound?" The dog didn't know.

Five days ago, daytime temps here were above 110F (43C), last night, temps got below 50F (10C). I've actually seen swings that big in a single day but it isn't common.

When writing fanfiction, like the current Comics Retcon Universe stuff, it's polite and considerate to acknowledge the current copyright and/or trademark holders, when known. Especially if using artwork or logos.

Just a line near the top or bottom of a story, or on the Title page is enough. And it isn't required here, it's just a nice thing to do for the original owners of the stuff.

I may not be on much today, there's thunderstorms and flashfloods predicted for this area from now till the early morning. We're pretty safe from flashfloods, there are arroyos either side of me to channel the rainwater away but lightning, winds or floods may take out the power. I'll be staying off line, mostly, till this blows over, using my laptop or phone to access the site.

Hugs,
Erin