Emilie Burns

Important info first, then my computer history to follow.

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ABOUT ME

Bisexual cisgendered white profoundly deaf female, She/Her pronouns, married to my partner of 10 years, chatty and expressively descriptive in writing. Loves web work and learning new things especially when the mental diversion and busywork is needed for sanity's sake, and learning how to CMS is my new goal, and I have fallen in love with everything I've seen with Concrete5.

Caution: If I seem to overreact or flip out.. well... I'm not asking to be handled with kid gloves, but if possible, would you please consider proceeding as if I asked my question normally and simply ignore the cray? It's not about you and if I'm flipping out here, it's because I'm so frustrated and likely depressed and hitting a severe anxiety attack that I'm not able to control it. I do try to not respond or post in that mood, but...

I'm not in the best of health mentally. I'm in a position where I could wear that dinosaur shirt saying "All my friends are dead", and it's not far off from being literally true. Since I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, aka Stage IV in December of 2013 (that's the stage that kills you, the average life expectancy from diagnosis is 3 years, the 5 year survival rate is only 22%) and became heavily involved with MBC activism, I now have more close friends who are dead than alive. And one of my favorite patients where I worked as a nurse died a couple days ago. And between August and November of last year, I was heavily gaslit by some other people with MBC in an activist NPO I helped create until they successfully drove me out. I had a scare with a possible new primary cancer in my throat last April (which turned out to be a benign cyst, thank everything) and I hit the suicide point at the end of the year and went into the hospital voluntarily. Ended up in the wrong ward for the kind of help I needed - the lead psychiatrist could see it too, and readily agreed to release me to recuperate at home, and noted in my file to put me in a certain different ward, since the current one made me worse instead.

At the time of this writing, I've not slept in 2 days, and I'm not tired, and very creative and perky, when only just prior to this, I was extremely inert, sleeping around the clock, and having meltdowns over everything. It was such a clear possibility of rapid cycling that my wife called my sister and ran it past her. My sister confirmed it. Now that we know what the terms are and how to identify them and looking back with that information, she is 100% certain I've demonstrated hypomania as long as she's known me. (yes, she's not my blood sister, but we clicked on the first day in 1981, and her little brother adopted me on the spot as well, and her parents consider me their third child, so for all intent and purposes, we're sisters.) Hypomania is part of Bipolar Type II, and if that is the case, then I've been living with several mental health misdiagnosis issues since forever and possibly on the wrong medications. This is being brought up asap with my therapist and psychiatrist, and may have a large part in the aforementioned behavior issues.

*** If linking to a video for a how-to, please verify there's coherent subtitles or text explanations of what's happening. As I said initially, I'm profoundly deaf. ***

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COMPUTER/INTERNET/CODING HISTORY

My first desktop lacked any sort of capability to connect to the internet, a heavily refurbished frankenputer bought from an individual dealer/repairman. I used to write stories, original and fanfic, and that was about all it could do. It ran on MS-DOS, and I taught myself how to dig into the guts out of sheer panic and necessity (including the time when I accidentally deleted an entire chapter on both the hard drive and the disk backup. It wasn't accessible anymore through things like a recycle bin, it was gone-gone, but I managed after maybe 4 hours of effort to figure out without any guidebooks how to find it buried deep on the HD and restore the right version of the chapter completely.)

As far as the 'net goes, I've been around since 1997, through AOhelL using Windows 95. Taught myself HTML on Geocities long before Yahoo bought them out. Started looking for something that *wasn't* IE or AOhelL's internal browser before my first year was out, and Netscape was the lesser of the evils. I caught wind of Firefox during its version 2 stage, and I've been loyal ever since. (I've always had as many compatible and non-defunct browsers installed as possible, even if I never use them. I'd open my websites in them to check how code rendered in different ones, and I'd also use them to troubleshoot site errors to see if it was a Firefox thing or not. Still do.)

I'm a huge lover of open source. Not only because it's free (and I do donate when I can) and I'm on forced retirement from nursing due to terminal cancer (disability = limited income) but 9 times out of 10? I've found the open source versions of a product to be superior. (Case in point: Open Office vs Microsoft Office)

I'm good at HTML (in the early 2000s, I once did so much site and MySQL coding in a day that I clearly remember dreaming in code that night) and decent with basic CSS, but wobbly as it gets fancier, and fake it til I make it with CSS3. This is my first foray into CMS, and I've gone through all available CMS that fit the criteria I have: 1) open source and/or free; 2) Not Apache-only (my host is IIS) 3) Has an admin backend that does not look like a road trip in a van with no air conditioner on 50 miles of bad desert dirt road in the middle of a summer afternoon packed between passengers from Westboro and Scientology.

Bless you, Concrete5. Bless. Seriously, it's the only one I've found that hit all three, and I do love what I see and I want to make this work so bad.