As some of you may have noticed, I haven’t been ‘around’ much for the last few months.  I’ve done regular and occasional ‘admin work’ on the site behind the scenes, but haven’t actually done a post in a long while until now.

I apologize for my lack of activity, and hope to be posting regularly again quite soon.  My reasons for being ‘absent’ are health-related.  So, for those of you who come here purely for iPhone information (and rightly so) the very short story is: I was doing quite poorly, doing much better now, and hoping to be back to posting at something like full strength in January.

For any of you who want to know a little more (it’s not pretty – I don’t recommend it), read on after the jump …

So yeah, I’ve got a sort of ‘Sick Note’ for my lack of activity over recent months.  I’m going to try to keep this quite brief as well – as it’s not my favorite subject and it’s not a very cheerful one.

I have cancer.  I was initially diagnosed with it in January of 2007.  In 2007 I had surgery to remove a large tumor and then went through chemo and radiation treatments.  When those finished, I recovered steadily and was doing quite well for around a year – all my scans were clean and I was ‘cancer-free’. 

Then in June (of this year) I got a headache.  Throughout my life I’ve hardly ever had headaches – really once in a blue moon.  Well, this headache lasted a week!  So I went and got an MRI and a cancerous brain tumor was found.  I have been *very* fortunate – in that the tumor was operable and in a very good spot apparently – both in terms of relatively easy access for the surgeon, and in terms of having minimal risks of lasting damage or side effects from the removal operation. 

So soon after it was discovered, I had an op to remove it.  That went very well, and was closely followed by radiation treatments to the brain.  Those treatments flat out kicked my arse, and have continued to kick it for months.  Severe fatigue and nausea / inability to eat have been the things I’ve struggled most with.  Energy levels get very low when you can’t manage anything like a full meal for weeks on end

Over the last month or so, I have been slowly and steadily feeling better, and regaining some strength and energy. I’ve started getting on the web a bit more, and even engaging with the world a fair bit more than I had been over recent months (almost any level of engagement beats the Zero level I’ve been at).

Anyway, I am really hoping that I will continue to steadily improve and get completely past my recent issues – and hoping to be able to post more regularly and run this site more actively come January.

Once again, apologies for the long absence.  I owe a HUGE thank you to Brandon, Ragart, JoeT, and Lincoln for contributing great posts and articles during my down-time – and to all of you who visit the site!  I hope we’ll ‘see’ more of each other soon …

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