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I’d just like to point out that you don’t actually care about Terri Schiavo. Thanks.

I’m glad to say that Bruce’s condition is improving. My uncle John is closer to the situation and has more info, so I’ll direct you to his journal instead of just repeating his entries.

I did my taxes last night. More importantly, for the first time since 1999, I did not complete the FAFSA. TAKE THAT, HIGHER EDUCATION!

Man, I really hope I graduate.

My cousin Bruce is critically ill in a hospital in Indianapolis. He’s had a transplanted kidney for the last seven years, and things have often been a little rough with it, but this time a viral infection in his pancreas seems to have caused it to fail entirely. The last I heard, things were improving slightly for him–they reduced some of the swelling and fluid buildup, but he’s still on oxygen and morphine. I hope things continue to improve.

Bruce lived with my family for a while, when I was in middle school and he was taking classes at EKU. He brought with him a huge and nearly comprehensive collection of first edition AD&D resource books, miniatures and modules, not to mention games like Paranoia and Gamma World. When he moved out, he left them to me. It was a huge and valuable gift, magnified by who I was (and am). I still have every piece of it.

He went to dialysis at the time, of course, and had for years, and would until 1998. I wonder what it was like when he went in for the last time. He showed me the scar tissue that had built up on his arm from the treatments, once, and the image has never left me.

It turns out rock ‘n’ roll is actually a pretty bad foundation for a city.

Hard Action Adjuster

There is a new Lady in the Next Cube.

LitNC: “You know what I think? They need to–grow some, and tell that bitch–they let her run that place. You know? She’s an adjuster.

Strutting around like she owns the place! She’s a loose cannon! She can’t be trusted! Hand over your badge!

I need PHP to go up one level of a directory, then go back down several more, to include a file. I don’t know how to do this, but I’ve been getting around it by using a URL instead of a path; now Dreamhost is turning off the option of using URLs in include statements, for (good) security reasons, so I can’t do that anymore.

I also absolutely can’t find a way to do it the path way. It won’t work with an absolute path from the root directory, nor from the highest web-accessible directory (I’m in a Linux / Apache environment, if you hadn’t guessed). I can’t use ..s to ratchet up, or do any other kind of relative movement I can think of. Does anyone know how to get what I want?

Actually, Lisa, I think you’re the only PHP programmer who reads this, so maybe I should have just emailed you. But I might be wrong.

Update 0224 hrs: Never mind. I found out how to do it, but it doesn’t help, since I need to have Apache parse the file (a NewsBruiser portal CGI, if you hadn’t guessed) before I grab it, and an internal include obviously doesn’t do that. I’ll have to use the curl library, once I figure out what it is.

And I know I’m a bad programmer for going with this setup in the first place, but I had the choice of frames, meta refreshes or dumping a load on PHP, and it was rocks and frying pans all over.