Orin

You are all most welcome. Doing this was our way to honor our friend (and 'water-brother' for any Heinlein fans out there) Bill. Deb is currently in upstate NY, caring for her mother, and will return in another month or two. When we are back together, we'd be honored to have a fine dinner out, and to raise a glass to Bill and the community here.

You are all most welcome. Doing this was our way to honor our friend (and 'water-brother' for any Heinlein fans out there) Bill. Deb is currently in upstate NY, caring for her mother, and will return in another month or two. When we are back together, we'd be honored to have a fine dinner out, and to raise a glass to Bill and the community here.

I'm using a MacBook Pro as well. Those icons were hidden until I widened my window to the whole screen. For some reason, it's hiding rather than wrapping them if there is not enough room across.

Deb, who has Fibromyalgia, has taken it for pain for years, and is miserable if she misses her dose.
I was prescribed some for nerve pain after my Saab got wrecked, and I could not straighten out or put any weight on one leg due to sciatica. There were some left after I recovered, and when I took one out of curiosity, I found it had perceptual effects. My brain stopped processing the images into 3D and I had two flat images that overlapped on what I focussed on. I also slept really well.

There are times when I just have to be blatantly self-promotional. If you like to read short stories, and you're not that particular about whether they were formally published, there are several websites where you can read lots of them. One of those is my Wordpress blog, which has about 120 of my own stories. The preponderance of them are political, in one way or another, and I have a tendency towards stories in which a group of people accomplishes something, as opposed to some singular hero. So, click over if you're interested, or not.

There are times when I just have to be blatantly self-promotional. If you like to read short stories, and you're not that particular about whether they were formally published, there are several websites where you can read lots of them. One of those is my Wordpress blog, which has about 120 of my own stories. The preponderance of them are political, in one way or another, and I have a tendency towards stories in which a group of people accomplishes something, as opposed to some singular hero. So, click over if you're interested, or not.

Thanks. If you haven't found it elsewhere, we're Bill's friends and co-workers. Deb and I have known him since 1978. He even officiated at our wedding in 1994.

It's not too late, but we need to contact him so he can coordinate with Deb. They're leaving town tomorrow. Can anyone here do that? I'll be checking my messages periodically.

Do you want to get a sense about how much support there is for bringing it back up from the people here before buying that domain?

He was indeed on Medicaid, so they would have a claim on assets he had that are worth anything, which he didn't. A cursory glance ought to tell them there's not much blood to be squeezed from that stone. Rather than spending more than there is to be gotten, they might just move on to bigger fish. If they come looking, he ran a couple of unprofitable websites that didn't even run ads. If they were to sell them, I suppose someone (!) could offer them a pittance for the domain names, based on the free internet appraisal values of like $100 for one and $250 for the other and quietly make off with them.

Here's another way of saying that. It's on the 'Man in the Moon' Peter Max poster that commemorated the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969:
 
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." -- Robert Goddard
 
BTW, Deb is en route to Las Vegas to see about gaining control of the DNS info about the original domain name for this place, so @RadioRob can make it point to wherever this site lives, and the redirect from the old server will no longer be needed. None of this changes the ownership of the site, or affects whether it is listed by whoever the court assigns to be Executor or Administrator as part of the estate.

Here's another way of saying that. It's on the 'Man in the Moon' Peter Max poster that commemorated the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969:
 
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." -- Robert Goddard
 
BTW, Deb is en route to Las Vegas to see about gaining control of the DNS info about the original domain name for this place, so @RadioRob can make it point to wherever this site lives, and the redirect from the old server will no longer be needed. None of this changes the ownership of the site, or affects whether it is listed by whoever the court assigns to be Executor or Administrator as part of the estate.

Here's another way of saying that. It's on the 'Man in the Moon' Peter Max poster that commemorated the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969:
 
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." -- Robert Goddard
 
BTW, Deb is en route to Las Vegas to see about gaining control of the DNS info about the original domain name for this place, so @RadioRob can make it point to wherever this site lives, and the redirect from the old server will no longer be needed. None of this changes the ownership of the site, or affects whether it is listed by whoever the court assigns to be Executor or Administrator as part of the estate.

Here's another way of saying that. It's on the 'Man in the Moon' Peter Max poster that commemorated the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969:
 
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." -- Robert Goddard
 
BTW, Deb is en route to Las Vegas to see about gaining control of the DNS info about the original domain name for this place, so @RadioRob can make it point to wherever this site lives, and the redirect from the old server will no longer be needed. None of this changes the ownership of the site, or affects whether it is listed by whoever the court assigns to be Executor or Administrator as part of the estate.

Here's another way of saying that. It's on the 'Man in the Moon' Peter Max poster that commemorated the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969:
 
"It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow." -- Robert Goddard
 
BTW, Deb is en route to Las Vegas to see about gaining control of the DNS info about the original domain name for this place, so @RadioRob can make it point to wherever this site lives, and the redirect from the old server will no longer be needed. None of this changes the ownership of the site, or affects whether it is listed by whoever the court assigns to be Executor or Administrator as part of the estate.

Early this morning, something happened at the hosting company, and the site fell through a wormhole. I'd been talking with @RadioRob about it yesterday, and contacted him. For most of the day, he's been busy rescuing the site. Since he couldn't get it to work on the old server, he copied it to another one, and set up a new URL, M4M-forum.org to point to it. Now that it's working in its new home, the old site re-directs to the new one, where you should be now. Please bookmark the new URL.
 
Once we have updated the DNS entries for the old site's URL to point to the new server, the redirect will no longer be needed and the old server can be relinquished. There is other work to do for moving the review site.
 
All of this means that it is time to decide who will own and run this place.

Perhaps I am mistaken, but I thought it was a given that nothing will happen until the court rules. Every discussion has that caveat, whether noted or not.

After the hospitals' social worker was unable to find next-of-kin to make medical decisions for Bill, she sought his long-time friends, and Deb knew him the longest, by a hair. (I'm second, by a technicality.) When he had died, and his body was handed off to the mortuary, the people there put her down as next-of-kin, and asked about the burial arrangements. Because we paid for the cremation, under Nevada law, we are qualified to receive a Death Certificate. (They are restricted to qualified people and agencies in NV.) The Death Certificate has been issued by the NV Health Department. We have already requested copies, but have not yet received them.

After the hospitals' social worker was unable to find next-of-kin to make medical decisions for Bill, she sought his long-time friends, and Deb knew him the longest, by a hair. (I'm second, by a technicality.) When he had died, and his body was handed off to the mortuary, the people there put her down as next-of-kin, and asked about the burial arrangements. Because we paid for the cremation, under Nevada law, we are qualified to receive a Death Certificate. (They are restricted to qualified people and agencies in NV.) The Death Certificate has been issued by the NV Health Department. We have already requested copies, but have not yet received them.

Can anyone here speak to the type and amount of editorial work that Bill performed on the reviews site? That would indicate what and how much could be automated.

After the hospitals' social worker was unable to find next-of-kin to make medical decisions for Bill, she sought his long-time friends, and Deb knew him the longest, by a hair. (I'm second, by a technicality.) When he had died, and his body was handed off to the mortuary, the people there put her down as next-of-kin, and asked about the burial arrangements. Because we paid for the cremation, under Nevada law, we are qualified to receive a Death Certificate. (They are restricted to qualified people and agencies in NV.) The Death Certificate has been issued by the NV Health Department. We have already requested copies, but have not yet received them.

IANAL, but...
 
In the absence of a will, the court would first determine who is to be the executor or administrator of the estate. There's a hierarchy to follow for this process, beginning with certain values of 'kin', which a court representative is supposed to explore. That person is then empowered to determine the value of the estate. In the case of these sites, because they are not operated to produce a profit for the owner, the question becomes what was the value for which Bill had been running them. The intrinsic value of these sites is simply to benefit the community which use them. A cogent executor or administrator might then inquire about this, and then use the willingness of the community to take responsibility for it to guide the disposition of the sites.
 
The executor would note that Bill's friends had paid for his funeral expenses, and ask them for input. Knowing what the community's goals are would make it possible for us to help guide that decision. And if we are selected to be Administrator, so much the better.

I don't want this to turn into a train wreck, so please allow me to make a few points.
 
We, 'Team Washington', as we've been dubbed, have been working to preserve Bill's digital assets, these two sites, as he would have wanted. In order to accomplish that, we first had to convince the hosting company to let us provide payment, so that they didn't go dark. Once that was accomplished, we found that there was another problem: the license for the XenForo engine had expired, ending support and updates. To address that, we would need to upload a file to the site's directory on the server, and that meant getting access to it. Bill had set things up so that it could not be accessed except from his computer, so we asked the hosting company if they could make that possible. Doing this was what caused the first brief outage.
 
But there was a side-effect. During the night, some automated process at the hosting company, which could now access the server as well, updated something that broke the site. @RadioRob attempted to fix the problem, but after a lot of work, concluded that it would be better to port the code and database to a server that he had control of, so he could return it to life. This meant registering this here new domain, and redirecting traffic from the old URL to here. All of this was a work-around, a means to keep this site running.
 
Ownership of the site has not changed as of this time, and 'Team Washington' do not wish to own it. It now has an alias, of sorts. Going forward, assuming ownership is changed, the original domain will still be its primary URL, but the alias will work as well, and it might be easier for people to remember.
 
So we're in a holding pattern here. The state has not yet spoken. We have not gotten the death certificate. Being able to present a clear idea of what the community would like to do with the sites would help whoever it is that decides the disposition of the sites to understand the value of this place to its inhabitants, and to act accordingly.

I don't want this to turn into a train wreck, so please allow me to make a few points.
 
We, 'Team Washington', as we've been dubbed, have been working to preserve Bill's digital assets, these two sites, as he would have wanted. In order to accomplish that, we first had to convince the hosting company to let us provide payment, so that they didn't go dark. Once that was accomplished, we found that there was another problem: the license for the XenForo engine had expired, ending support and updates. To address that, we would need to upload a file to the site's directory on the server, and that meant getting access to it. Bill had set things up so that it could not be accessed except from his computer, so we asked the hosting company if they could make that possible. Doing this was what caused the first brief outage.
 
But there was a side-effect. During the night, some automated process at the hosting company, which could now access the server as well, updated something that broke the site. @RadioRob attempted to fix the problem, but after a lot of work, concluded that it would be better to port the code and database to a server that he had control of, so he could return it to life. This meant registering this here new domain, and redirecting traffic from the old URL to here. All of this was a work-around, a means to keep this site running.
 
Ownership of the site has not changed as of this time, and 'Team Washington' do not wish to own it. It now has an alias, of sorts. Going forward, assuming ownership is changed, the original domain will still be its primary URL, but the alias will work as well, and it might be easier for people to remember.
 
So we're in a holding pattern here. The state has not yet spoken. We have not gotten the death certificate. Being able to present a clear idea of what the community would like to do with the sites would help whoever it is that decides the disposition of the sites to understand the value of this place to its inhabitants, and to act accordingly.

I don't want this to turn into a train wreck, so please allow me to make a few points.
 
We, 'Team Washington', as we've been dubbed, have been working to preserve Bill's digital assets, these two sites, as he would have wanted. In order to accomplish that, we first had to convince the hosting company to let us provide payment, so that they didn't go dark. Once that was accomplished, we found that there was another problem: the license for the XenForo engine had expired, ending support and updates. To address that, we would need to upload a file to the site's directory on the server, and that meant getting access to it. Bill had set things up so that it could not be accessed except from his computer, so we asked the hosting company if they could make that possible. Doing this was what caused the first brief outage.
 
But there was a side-effect. During the night, some automated process at the hosting company, which could now access the server as well, updated something that broke the site. @RadioRob attempted to fix the problem, but after a lot of work, concluded that it would be better to port the code and database to a server that he had control of, so he could return it to life. This meant registering this here new domain, and redirecting traffic from the old URL to here. All of this was a work-around, a means to keep this site running.
 
Ownership of the site has not changed as of this time, and 'Team Washington' do not wish to own it. It now has an alias, of sorts. Going forward, assuming ownership is changed, the original domain will still be its primary URL, but the alias will work as well, and it might be easier for people to remember.
 
So we're in a holding pattern here. The state has not yet spoken. We have not gotten the death certificate. Being able to present a clear idea of what the community would like to do with the sites would help whoever it is that decides the disposition of the sites to understand the value of this place to its inhabitants, and to act accordingly.