No Sheet-Reserves Necessary!
Hans did it! He called me from his crib, his underwear were dry, and he let forth quite a stream into the appropriate receptacle! Not once, but twice!
We might be able to do this training thing….sufficient bribery is an important part, and Hans is enjoying the fruits — the “gums” — of his successes.
Now I think I’ll spare you all from further updates on this one, I promise. I think I’ve run out of semi-dignified ways to speak of it all. :)
Dignity is highly overrated. My father did think that I ought to post a warning on my blog saying “Caution, objectional potty training material discussed” or something like that.
Congratulations on the breakthrough – it sounds like he’s really figuring it out! May the process be short and effective – and I for one wouldn’t mind updates! :-)
Dignity may be overrated, but on the other hand, how would you like to be able to Google your name fifteen years down the line and have detailed records of your toilet training experience publicly available online? This stuff doesn’t just magically and conveniently disappear in a few years…there are more senses than one in which dignity applies.
Hmm. Good point. I’ll shall have to check with Ben to see where all of my blogging will go – I want a record of it, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be online..
Although, I have to say, it probably wouldn’t make that big of a difference to me if there were a record – mothers frequently talk about their labor experiences with specific children and other potentially embarrasing information, then there are always the little kids in bath pictures, and such – and we all survive.
On second though – I take that back. I will make certain that such records are unavailable to people 15 years down the road – teenagers especially are sensitive, and what if he were running for office?!!
Right. But the problem is, I wasn’t talking about it being available on this website, or yours, but rather Google’s…once a thing gets indexed, it almost never goes away. In other words, it’s already much too late. :)
How does that work?!! I guess I just don’t understand how the internet works, huh? I thought that the posts were stored somewhere – in the storage that Ben has that I’m using and that he could delete it from his space, wherever it is. Does Google keep copies? (Sorry Mystie, for the rabbit trail)
Yes, the posts are stored in a database that is located on your web server, which you (or Ben) could very well delete. But yes, Google (among others) does keep “cached” copies of pages to provide when the original page goes away or is temporarily down for some reason.
And now, a brief introduction to the Way that Search Engines Work:
In order for search engines to work, they send out “spiders” which are programs designed to browse (or “crawl”) the web, following links and keeping track of what exists where. Each page the spider chooses to index (which, sooner or later, is pretty much all of them) gets included in the search engine’s “index”, which is what actually gets referenced when you go to search for web pages. (Do a search on Google and notice that most results come with a link that says “Cached” – that’s the copy in Google’s index, which was a snapshot of whenever their spider indexed that particular page.) Then there are other sites such as the Internet Archive, which, although somewhat behind Google, has the explicit purpose of preserving web content as it was at any given point in time for others to view in the future (sort of a “museum of the Internet”, if you will). Then there are all the various other search engines with their own indexes, and so forth, not to mention anybody else who happens to quote anything you say on their web site, which gets indexed, etc. The bottom line is that if you’ve published it online, it’s reasonable to make the assumption that it’ll always be out there somewhere. (Unless, of course, it’s something that you actually need to find later, in which case as soon as you delete it it will mysteriously disappear off the face of the planet.)
This should probably take a place somewhere in Matt’s Rules of the Internet.
Rule #1: Everything you read on the Internet is a lie until explicitly proven otherwise. Rule #2: Nothing on the Internet ever goes away.
I’m forgetting the other rules at the moment, but those are the important ones anyway.
Hmm. Well, thanks for the computer lesson – I will bear that in mind. :-) Now I think I’ll go search for my name and my children’s names on Google, to see what comes up! :-) Sorry again, Mystie. :-)