StopSylvia.com - What Happened?

[RSLancastr]

All: I wrote the following as a new article for the SSB/SS site many weeks ago, but have yet to add it to the site, so I am posting it here for comments and input:

As of this writing (Aug 24 2009), it has been more than a year since I last added an article to this site.

Since then, I have received emails asking why the delay, and what has happened, so I am writing this article to answer those questions.

OUCH

On August 4 2008, I suffered a massive stroke on the right side of my brain, which resulted in partial paralysis to the left side of my body.

I spent the following eleven months in various hospitals, nursing homes and physical rehabilitation centers, finally being discharged back home on June 30 2009.

I am now a wheelchair user, and rely on my wonderful wife Susan for help transferring from the chair to bed (and back), as well as for tons of other things. She has truly been what has kept me going this past year, and, due to her quick thinking and acting when I had the stroke, is quite likely responsible for saving my life, or, at the very least, for saving me from additional brain damage.

When I was in the ambulance being taken from our home to the hospital, one of my first thoughts was "I wonder how long it will take Sylvia Browne to claim that she predicted this?" Browne already has a record of this sort of behavior, having claimed that she had predicted James Randi's heart bypass surgery. It was a false claim, and is the subject of a planned future article on this site.

To my knowledge, Browne has made no such claim regarding my stroke. But even if she had predicted it, unless she had included details such as the date and time, it would not have been impressive. At the time of the stroke, I was a middle-aged (50 years old), morbidly obese (close to 400 pounds) man with a record of extremely high blood pressure
(something I had discussed publically on a number of Internet forums), so it didn't even take a doctor, let alone a psychic, to see that I was heading for a stroke or a heart attack.

STOP STOPPED?

While I was convalescing (in fact, while I was slipping in and out of a coma), my registration of the stopsylviabrowne.com domain name expired, and was subsequently purchased by someone who has used it to host his own, pro-psychic web site. Luckily, I already had the rights to the domain name "www.stopsylvia.com, and some of my web-savvy friends moved my old site, with all of its articles, over to the StopSylvia.com address. If you have links to the old address, please change them to use the new one.

Also, during the past year, pages on some skeptical web sites were created which people could use to donate money to a fund which had been set up to help Susan and I with my mounting medical bills. This fund ended up totalling some $21,000, most of which went towards the purchase of a wheelchair-capable minivan, which has been wonderfully useful to us, allowing us to go places we couldn't otherwise.

If you were one of the many generous folks who contributed to this fund, Susan and I are more grateful than we can say. Thank you so very much for your support and generosity.

EMAIL

Being out of commission for the past year, I have not been answering emails. If this has caused you any concern or inconvenience, please accept my apologies. Until I have my old email back up and working again, I can be reached at my personal email address, which is RSLancastr@aol.com.

HOW AM I NOW?

Although I am far better now than I was right after the stroke, I still have a way to go before I am where I was before the stroke. I am now a wheelchair user, with only partial use of my left arm and leg. With ongoing therapy, I get a little better every day.

Warm Regards,

Robert S. Lancaster
webmaster and founder,
www.StopSylvia.com

So, your thoughts? It was obviously written for those users of the site who are not regulars here, and so are in the dark about much of this.

 

[ExMinister]

Exellent, sir.

I know you say you are not back to your old self yet, but your writing sure hasn't changed in any way that is noticeable to me.

Now, if only we could get you access to your web site!

 

[Ersby]

Shouldn't you spell out your email, rather than having it as a link? Otherwise you'll just get a load of spam.

btw, did anyone else read the thread title and think that this site had been ruined too?

 

[LissaLysikan]

Shouldn't you spell out your email, rather than having it as a link? Otherwise you'll just get a load of spam.

Doesn't help a lot because people tend to use "forms" such as spelling the word dot in place of putting a dot. The address harvesters know this and write their code to take it into account. If you want to avoid a harvester about the only thing you can do any more is not place your email in any way into publicly available text space. Fortunately forum scrapers are on the decline because they yield too many false addresses and that reduces the value of the list. The current method is to buy userlists from places like Hotmail, where the users implicitly "give consent" unless they choose not to.
Note: It's been six months since I was last in a software security position, so this info might be dated.

 

[Steven Howard]

So, your thoughts? It was obviously written for those users of the site who are not regulars here, and so are in the dark about much of this.

Looks good to me. You might want to think about putting in a link to one or more of the fundraising efforts. I know you probably don't want to look like you're begging for money, but I also imagine that people who are fans of the site and don't frequent this site might want to contribute something. Might be wishful thinking on my part, but you could wind up with a bunch of emails asking "How can I contribute?" and so it might be better to answer that in advance.

 

[Pup]

If you want to avoid a harvester about the only thing you can do any more is not place your email in any way into publicly available text space. Fortunately forum scrapers are on the decline because they yield too many false addresses and that reduces the value of the list.

For what it's worth, I post on several forums where it's normal to sign your real name and I always include my email address after my name. I've done so since the 1990s, probably two or three posts a day at least, and I get so little spam that I don't even use a spam filter, maybe half a dozen lottery winner and drug spams a day. So in my experience at least, there's no down-side to putting an unmasked email address online, at least in legitimate discussion forums or on my own business website that I had for a few years--don't know about get-rich-quick sites and other "bad neighborhoods."

 

[Amapola]

I think it's great - it sums everything up very well.

It seems to me that your writing style is exactly the same now as it always has been. You've come a long way and have every right to be proud of your progress.

 

[RSLancastr]

Exellent, sir.

I know you say you are not back to your old self yet, but your writing sure hasn't changed in any way that is noticeable to me.

Now, if only we could get you access to your web site!

Thanks, ExM! Susan said much the same thing, and seemed to be surprised that I could still write when she first read it in August.

Shouldn't you spell out your email, rather than having it as a link? Otherwise you'll just get a load of spam.

A point I had not considered, thanks. Not sure if I'll change it, though.

btw, did anyone else read the thread title and think that this site had been ruined too?

Doesn't help a lot because people tend to use "forms" such as spelling the word dot in place of putting a dot. The address harvesters know this and write their code to take it into account. If you want to avoid a harvester about the only thing you can do any more is not place your email in any way into publicly available text space. Fortunately forum scrapers are on the decline because they yield too many false addresses and that reduces the value of the list. The current method is to buy userlists from places like Hotmail, where the users implicitly "give consent" unless they choose not to.
Note: It's been six months since I was last in a software security position, so this info might be dated.

Thanks, Lissa! I think that, for now, I will leave it be.

Looks good to me. You might want to think about putting in a link to one or more of the fundraising efforts. I know you probably don't want to look like you're begging for money, but I also imagine that people who are fans of the site and don't frequent this site might want to contribute something. Might be wishful thinking on my part, but you could wind up with a bunch of emails asking "How can I contribute?" and so it might be better to answer that in advance.

you're right - I am NOT comfortable putting a fund-raising link in the article. the only reason I mention the fund-raising at all is so that I could say "thanks." If I get enough emails asking about it, I can add a link as am update to the article later, and it will seem less like begging, I think.

 

[xenxabar]

you're right - I am NOT comfortable putting a fund-raising link in the article. the only reason I mention the fund-raising at all is so that I could say "thanks." If I get enough emails asking about it, I can add a link as am update to the article later, and it will seem less like begging, I think.

I searched "Robert Lancaster stroke" in Google and the donation site was the third result, and through the second page of results were all articles that likely linked back as well. People wanting to help should have an easy time finding where to go.

Great to have you back in action, sir.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Great to see a new article on the site!

Just FYI, tomorrow I'll be joggling (running while juggling 3 clubs non-stop) a half marathon tomorrow morning, and I plan to wear my Stop Sylvia baseball cap. I'll try to send you a photo.

As for including actual e-mail links: I've had the same e-mail address since around 1998, and I have the full thing on my website and in my sig on e-mails and elsewhere. I don't think I get more spam than people using a hotmail account who change accounts every 6 months or so. Mac Mail does a pretty good job of filtering out the spam (though I filter it all to a separate box where I do check through it quickly, and I only rarely find something there that doesn't belong--though I am more worried about Type II errors than Type I).

 

[RSLancastr]

Great to have you back in action, sir.

Thanks, Xen!

Great to see a new article on the site!

Well, it's not on the site just yet...

Just FYI, tomorrow I'll be joggling (running while juggling 3 clubs non-stop) a half marathon tomorrow morning, and I plan to wear my Stop Sylvia baseball cap. I'll try to send you a photo.

Thanks, Joe! I'd love to see a pic!

As for including actual e-mail links: I've had the same e-mail address since around 1998, and I have the full thing on my website and in my sig on e-mails and elsewhere. I don't think I get more spam than people using a hotmail account who change accounts every 6 months or so. Mac Mail does a pretty good job of filtering out the spam (though I filter it all to a separate box where I do check through it quickly, and I only rarely find something there that doesn't belong--though I am more worried about Type II errors than Type I).

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

Well, it's not on the site just yet...

D'oh! I was just assuming it's up.

Is there still a technical problem with your posting new articles? (IIRC, the last issue was that you didn't have a copy of the site files and templates or whatever on a local hard drive.)

 

[RSLancastr]

D'oh! I was just assuming it's up.

Is there still a technical problem with your posting new articles? (IIRC, the last issue was that you didn't have a copy of the site files and templates or whatever on a local hard drive.)

yes, and that is still the primary issue.

 

[George 152]

Shouldn't you spell out your email, rather than having it as a link? Otherwise you'll just get a load of spam.

You could always use Mailwasher Pro from FireTrust.

 

[EeneyMinnieMoe]

I hope you put it up. It is excellent. Very well written, as usual.

Off topic. A lot of Sylvia Browne's books are now partially available through Google Books. I took a look at a few. Once again, I'm struck by how obvious it is that she doesn't write them. Whoever writes them is way too articulate, too smart, too well educated and too adept at constructing a sensible accurately spelled sentence with a start, middle and end to be Sylvia Celeste Shoemaker Brown Browne.

There's a chapter in one of her books where she talks about psychic attacks, whatever in the world that may be, and some sort of psychic depression, whatever in the world that may be.

There's a passage in there that is absolutely hilarious (page 210):

http://books.google.com/books?id=X1...FluREpYa7uiMLrYkqcTlKnAo#v=onepage&q=&f=false

"If all those people knew what an insignificant, worthless, undeserving person I really am, they wouldn't ask me for advice on laundry detergent, let alone their lives and spirituality. Who in the world did I think I was, and how in the world did I have the nerve to run around pretending I had answers that mattered? If I had answers, I wouldn't feel so empty."

It's a rare moment when I fully agree with Sylvia Browne .

 

[SeekingTruth]

There's a passage in there that is absolutely hilarious (page 210):

http://books.google.com/books?id=X1...FluREpYa7uiMLrYkqcTlKnAo#v=onepage&q=&f=false

"If all those people knew what an insignificant, worthless, undeserving person I really am, they wouldn't ask me for advice on laundry detergent, let alone their lives and spirituality. Who in the world did I think I was, and how in the world did I have the nerve to run around pretending I had answers that mattered? If I had answers, I wouldn't feel so empty."

It's a rare moment when I fully agree with Sylvia Browne .

WOW, Robert should use that quote on his site....he can finally say that he's found ONE thing that Sylvia was truthful about!

Robert, it's so good to see you here....and from the way your newest article reads, you haven't missed a step!! Your brain very obviously recovered fully because you're back to your logical, rational, succinct self...Good to know you've come back so well my friend!

Nancy

 

[RSLancastr]

WOW, Robert should use that quote on his site....he can finally say that he's found ONE thing that Sylvia was truthful about!

Robert, it's so good to see you here....and from the way your newest article reads, you haven't missed a step!! Your brain very obviously recovered fully because you're back to your logical, rational, succinct self...Good to know you've come back so well my friend!

Nancy

Thanks, nancy!

My cognition was tested back around aug 2009, and the psychiatrist who
administered the test said that I scored higher in many sections of the test than he had ever seen in 25 years of administering the test. and in one section I scored "almost flawlessly," which he had never seen before.

So, it would seem that at least some portions of my brain are running on all cylinders. now if only my body would catch up.

 

[Just_Me]

i did have a look at the old site last night and wondered why it had gone over to a pro psychic site . now i know . i am glad to hear you are recovering robert and am now going to read through your proper site .

 

[RSLancastr]

i did have a look at the old site last night and wondered why it had gone over to a pro psychic site . now i know . i am glad to hear you are recovering robert and am now going to read through your proper site .

Is it Just_Me, or... yes, it is!