Tuesday 6 April 1999

Pic of the day: Negotiations.

Time flies when you're having fun! (Actually, when you're having fun, you're probably absorbed by something very different from timing flies. Unless you happen to be a dedicated entomologist.) A fairly wonderful Easter week is over, and the harsh cries of the gray dawn of work arise.

Got the tape drive at work fixed. This we couldn't do until after the office was closed for the public. That's OK, I need a bit of overtime to compensate for my accumulated undertime. I'm like 20 hours in the red now. Blame it on the shop windows.

As you know, I've pulled my oldest diaries from the Web due to lack of space. Pictures, even JPG, take more space than a thousand words. I could have left the text without the pics, but I feel that they belong together in life and death. Not that I've been all too good at matching pics with text, but usually both in their own way say something about my day.
Actually, I've considered making a thumbnail calendar. Not only would this make it easier to watch my moustache wax and wane, as it were; it might offer an alternate view on my life. I may in fact go on and make such a beast for my own edutainment if nothing else.

But based on experience, my web space is probably near full already. For this reason, I've been over and sniffed on Crosswinds, the Canadian Free Unlimited server and mail provider with no banners or popups on your site. It sounds too good to be true, but I've watched them out of the corner of my eye for months now, and they seem more vigorous than ever.
They do not allow you to use an account there as "storage space" which you call from another site. I guess this means that, for instance, putting the actual JPGs there and linking to them from here would be no-no. (It would also be messy.) But presumably I could put complete months of retired diaries there, with a publicly available HTML interface similar to here. In short, I'm thinking of "outsourcing" the Diary Farm. And possibly giving it a new interface.
For the once a week that someone actually digs into these historical documents... :)

So if any of you know anything about Crosswinds that might stop me from signing up, speak now or forever hold your peace ...

If you thought EveryDayItems was winding down, you may want to go there again. They've given it a completely new interface. It has regrouped to its core functions, and is also now obviously the site of two people, not one. And they've finally got bedroomcam up and going again, which I understand people have been missing in their new locale.
The bad news? The site is now 800x600. For us with old computers, this could be a problem. Unless one happens, like me, to have the Opera browser, which just happens to have a handy scale function on its lower-right corner. Scale the page to 90% and it looks good enough, though you may want to sit fairly close if you have a small monitor!