Sunday 11 April 1999

Pic of the day: First sign of life. A seed sprouts in an empty yoghurt box in my window. Perhaps it will grow up to become a large unwieldy flower, if I give it water now and then.

Today was a total pajamas day. I wasn't out of doors, but shuffled about in my blue-striped pajamas all day long. All wasn't glory, though: I had some uncomfortable cramps. The leg cramps almost certainly come from dancing too hard without warming up properly or spinning down properly after. The more intestinal cramps may come from too much and too wrong food. I've been eating very little today, mostly yoghurt and milk, but had a small pasta & cheese dinner at 20:30 (8:30 PM). Skipped the oil too, as a gesture to my stomach. Even without olive oil, it tasted delicious. But you already knew that.

Crosswinds: I've established a foothold on Crosswinds.net, the Canadian web & mail server that is totally free and with unlimited disk space. (Though you can't use it for storage, only for stuff that's legally accessible from the web, typically your own web pages and pictures.)

If this sounds too good to be true, then I recommend you pay them a visit and gawk at their ad banners, which finance the whole thing. That, and the fact that the place is drifted by idealists that are not (yet) out to make a quick buck from the Net, like everyone and their pet is. (Crosswinds has a pet cat, who is of course indifferent.)

Not only is the place free and unlimited, you can sign up and be online in less than one hour. The web utility pages let you upload your HTML pages and pictures and stuff in a very simple way, basically you just find it on your own disk and click "submit". This bypasses the need for FTP, which is probably a good thing since the FTP server did not have free capacity when I tried to upload my pages. They asked me to try outside peak hours. This was in the early morning hours on Sunday, Canadian time. I wonder when their less busy times are...

The event that forced my hand ahead of time was also FTP related. Saturday night, when I connected to SOL (Scandinavia OnLine) to upload my diary, I was disconnected. This happened again and again. Sometimes I got as far as the password, sometimes just the name, sometimes not even that. I tried again Sunday around noon, and it was the same way. So I activated my Crosswinds account, which I had thoughtfully ordered during the night. I made up an ad hoc index page, which I gave sufficiently unique graphics that it would not be confused with my other two.
The Diary Farm was born.

So far it's only a stopgap measure until the Scandinavian techies overcome their hangover and get the FTP fixed. But already I am preparing to put up the November pages that was taken offline for space constraints. If I find a good tracking system so I can see who passes by, I may transplant the entire web journal. I also have a few new ideas - but I always have, haven't I?

"Don't write 'this webpage is under construction'. All webpages are always under construction."