Cat Friday

And now for something completely different …

Jenn found this. The crazy thing is that, as of a week or two ago, Lucky just started wearing a red leather (fake lizardskin) collar. And yeah, he does the lying on his back thing.

Under the knife, two years later

Tomorrow, it will be two years to the day that I went under the knife in an effort to confirm or squelch the theory that I had stage two lymphoma. I had my throat slit and a probe was sent down into my chest, narrowly avoiding my lungs and heart and a biopsy of my swollen lymph node was taken. (I remember laying on the gurney as I was being wheeled in, thinking that 05/05/05 was a pretty memorable date, whatever happened.)

What it came back with, of course, was sarcoidosis, which was a new one on me, and I think everyone I knew.

Two years later, I still have some lingering problems with granuloma in my joints, particularly on my left side, but they’re diminishing over time. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was completely gone by this time next year.

HesperiaStar.com 2.1

At long last, the full archives of all the stories moved over onto HesperiaStar.com (more than 500 older stories from the original site, including everything about the casino, everything relating to the last election, everything about Hesperians affected by 9/11 or serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, and much more) will be accessible sometime after next Tuesday. It’ll take Google and all the other search engines a few days to go through all the archive links, but once that happens, all the old stuff should be available through any search engine you care to use.

Army leans on soldier blogs, e-mails

Over the last few years, I’ve done several online interviews with soldiers serving in Iraq, including getting digital photos taken by them. It’s much more immediate, obviously, than waiting until they return and it’s something I wish I could do more of.

It’s probably over, though, according to a piece in Wired:

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq — the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

“This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging,” said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. “No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has — it’s most honest voice out of the war zone. And it’s being silenced.”

Army Regulation 530–1: Operations Security (OPSEC) (.pdf) restricts more than just blogs, however. Previous editions of the rules asked Army personnel to “consult with their immediate supervisor” before posting a document “that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum.” The new version, in contrast, requires “an OPSEC review prior to publishing” anything — from “web log (blog) postings” to comments on internet message boards, from resumes to letters home.

Failure to do so, the document adds, could result in a court-martial, or “administrative, disciplinary, contractual, or criminal action.”

I’ve worked the PR side of the street, and I know of the frustrations of having someone go off-message, particularly when there’s the potential for leaking sensitive information. (Not to mention simply embarassing the leadership.)

Still, this is a real pity. Hopefully this will be revised or rolled-back.

Update: Not surprisingly, the folks over at the Columbia Journalism Review aren’t happy about this, either.

On the Media spoke to milbloggers, including Blackfive himself.

Edline in the Washington Post

Earlier this week, the Washington Post published an article about Edline, an online site that allows parents to keep tabs on their children’s grades, attendance and other classroom activities. Both Hesperia High School and Sultana High School have Edline sites set up.

At the beginning of this semester, Laura Iriarte Miguel switched anatomy classes.

No big deal. Students at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg can shift courses around at the start of each term. But when Iriarte Miguel remained on the roll in the wrong class for several days, her parents began receiving notices from Edline — an online, up-to-the-sec grade-tracking program used in Montgomery County middle and high schools — about her unexcused absences and zeros on quizzes.

Montgomery County high school senior Laura Iriarte Miguel is no fan of Edline, which records her grades and attendance in every subject.

Finally, one night at dinner, in between bites of spaghetti, her parents grilled her about her truancy and her rotten anatomy grades. She hadn’t told them she had opted into another class.

“They wanted to know why-why-why-why,” Iriarte Miguel says. She set them straight, but the air was still poisoned. The suspicion, she says, “accumulated in the back of their minds during the whole day.”

This could be a simple story of parental expectations and teenage lackadaisicalness. But it’s also a tale of an innovation at the nexus of a morphing world — symbolic of the changing nature of childhood, America’s abiding faith in education and the unforgiving quality of technology

If I wasn’t insanely busy this week — seriously, a week where the paper has to be done early, and where we have a lower-than-average page count is shaping up to be one of my busiest in my entire time here — I’d probably localize this story for Hesperia.