Wednesday 7 April 1999

Pic of the day: Daydreaming.

Not the greatest of days. I got up at a reasonable time in the morning, then a couple of subsystem revolted and I had to call another sickday. Another no-pay sickday. After things normalized, I fell asleep in my bed and slept for several hours. Not able to eat or drink much of anything until the evening, I played a bit Daggerfall and washed the floor, which was somewhat overdue. Wrote a tiny bit fantasy and daydreamt on and off. Was online now and again. Finally I played with my digicam and Graphics Works until it was late in the night again.

Well, I've done some exciting research during the last week or so, but sadly it's all rated adult (at the very least) so there won't be any details here. Let's just say, in the most general terms, that there seems to be an unmet demand for procreation without pleasure in the religious part of society. So far this has only been possible for women, but I think a solution is possible also for men. Guess I'll come back to this when I need test subjects.

Did y'all know that the major search engines use months to update their indices? That's right. For more remote eddies of the Web, such as personal home pages, the spider bots of Altavista, Hotbot etc will visit so rarely that they're nearly worthless. If you have made major changes to your web site, you have to manually submit it to these engines, or it might be half a year until the keywords are adjusted!
Say you had a website dedicated to house cats. Then your cat scratches you and you decide to kick it out and devote your precious web space to Mexican food instead. Well, people who search for Mexican food will not find your site, while those fascinated by cats will be unhappily surprised to press a cat link and end up with food.

Due to the time lag in search engines, and the limitations of keyword based search, these sites are barely useful at all in my experience. Human-made catalogs, like Yahoo (and Kvasir for my Scandinavian readers) suffer from a large delay too. They also seem to be arbitrary in what sites they include or not. The sad fact is that much, perhaps most, of my favorite sites have come to me from URLs given in printed magazines, and then I've just clicked on and on.

For instance, I once bought an issue of Komputer, a Norwegian family oriented computer magazine. There was an article about the trailblazing webcam star Jenni and her Jennicam. There was also the URL to a fan site, and on this there was a mention of The Nose's catalog of personal webcams. I went to that site and found that almost all the webcams were showcams/porncams and/or rarely on. However, I found Cornercam which was a nice healthy all-day all-night webcam, now known as EveryDayItems. If you do a search for that name on AltaVista, you'll not find it. Or at least I didn't yesterday. You have to happen upon someone who links to it.
Besides her webcam, Corny girl DS also periodically wrote a diary and put a JPG on it. (Particularly the weeks when her camera was offline.) This was the inspiration for my own .JPG Diary. I wrote this for months without knowing that there are lots of them out there, and that they actually make up entire communities where people often know each other and read and comment on each other's web journals.
It so happened that EveryDayItems, which was then known as SoyaRatCam, had (and still has) a discussion board. On this some rude visitor planted the address to GabGabCamCam. I found her writing far more interesting than her webcam (she's not exactly doing anything exciting, apart from occasionally lifting her cat, but she writes brilliantly). In her LinksLinks pages I found more Web Journals, and stumbled into that secret society on the Web. I bet most people don't know it exists, just like they didn't know about personal webcams until Jenni made a habit of sleeping with her occasionally nude rear sticking out of her bedclothes, to the excitement of elderly churchmen who then took the matter into the mainstream media.

Now, due to the socialistic costs of Net access here I can't have a camera following my rear all night long, so chances are I won't set off any spiritual revolution that way. But at least now you know how the Web works - or not works - for me. Hints and tips for good sites are greedily accepted.