Vertigo Update

After spending a few weeks chasing what my dosage should be to control the vertigo, I think we’ve found the sweet spot between managing it. Too much and the drug causes its own side effects, too little and it doesn’t properly control it. I’ve been on this dosage for a couple of weeks now and it’s made life a lot more fun with very minimal issues, which is nice. I did get out for the tests my specialized asked for, and the results just came in and the overall news is good, showing no signs of nerve damage or unexpected lesions or growth. It seems to indicate a treatment path my specialist had suggested but I haven’t had a chance to talk to them yet to see what they think. But overall, things seem moved in the right direction over the last couple of weeks.

Picking the Wrong Fight

I’m no fan of Chick-Fil-A — the politics of the owners convinced me to not eat at these restaurants, similar to my choice to not support Hobby Lobby with my money — but New York lawmakers are picking the wrong fight here. There are many bigger and important issues they should be working on. This is specific to the outlets at rest stops, but to be blunt about it, the time to have required this was when the leases were being issued, not now. Since this was how the outlets operated when these locations were leased to them, New York just needs to shut up and live with it. Should they choose not to renew leases or offer new leases at these places, I’d fully support that, but this just seems wrong to me.

Cleaned up the Archives

One of the projects I finally tackled was cleaning up the 6FPS Archives, which were a hot mess. Since moving to Squarespace Campaigns, I was linking to the newsletter as sent. A big problem with that is that as things change (like, oh, dumping Twitter in favor of Mastodon) there was no way to update the links, so over time, the archives were a haven for broken links and outdated information.

I’ve known for a while the proper way to do this was to make each issue a web page as well, so I can update them or remove outdated info as needed, but I also knew that was going to be a slog so I kept putting it off. Slog it was, it took me four editing sessions and about 7 hours to fix, but each issue is now its own page here on the site, and I’ve gone through and cleaned each one up as I moved them over. Older issues got edited to remove things like the info footers, since that’s where a lot of the broken links were, but I created a proper template for the newsletters and so starting with last issue, newsletters in the archive will contain everything — except for the things that break over time.

If you are thinking to yourself “I didn’t even know there were archives of 6FPS” then I don’t blame you; the page hid them way down at the bottom and gave no indication there was anything down there, so if you didn’t scroll, you’d never see them. As with any project where you open the hood and start fixing things, I ended up doing a bunch of little things along the way, and I think the 6FPS page is a lot cleaner and you can actually find the archives without going exploring.

By the way, if you want a nice tool to do link checking and help you find and fix the linkrot that is inevitable on the internet, I recommend the Integrity app on the mac. Works well. I’ve been using it for a long time and it is quite powerful but not complicated to use. I use it once a month just as a way to make sure things are working okay, and as of today, a sweep of my web site shows zero broken links or errors for the first time in a couple of years. Yay me.