Tuesday 29 December 1998
Pic of the day: Picked up another paperback. No idea if this is
good, bad or ugly. Remind me to report later if I forget it.
Back to work. The atmosphere was less than cordial on a workplace
where the bosses have taken an extended holiday leave and left a
very few workers to deal with an inhuman workload. The grumbling
was very loud at closing time. But the bosses know what they do:
The really tough work was almost exclusively put on women. They
may grumble, but they will never do anything to better their own
lot. Next year they will be there again, enraged and grumbling,
while their bosses will once again relax with a good drink on
some secluded vacation spot.
Speaking of hard, tireless work: Time to mention good old
Gibson Research again. Best known
as the home of SpinRite, Gibson has also made some other impressive
programs. One freeware is TIP - trouble in paradise - a program to
check zip and jazz drives. I am running it on my mail zip cartridge
in the background now. It does slow things down, but writing in
Notepad is still fast enough. My entire web site is made in Notepad,
and I'm proud of it. If it's too fancy to code by hand, you can bet
your nose skin that there is someone out there who can't get it to show
up right in his/her browser. (In fact, this may already be the
case with the pictures, which is why I try to make sure that the
page can be viewed in text-only without losing its meaning.)
Anyway, TIP does part of SpinRite's work but on removable disks
only, and for free. It checks the physical integrity of the
drive/cartridge combination, the surface of the disk, and renews
the magnetic track. Regular use should prevent or at least slow
down new errors on the disk, if the drive itself is OK. Otherwise
you will have an alert. And it's free. If you have a Jazz or Zip
drive, I highly recommend it.
Last night my ISP deigned to send me an e-mail with last week's
statistics on my website, which they haven't done since it was
created. There were more hits than expected, particularly on the
Diary which proved much more popular than my Daggerfall pages.
I may have slightly misjudged my public. Interesting. But I am
not going to put up counters on my pages. They will remain as
simple and as fast to load as they are today, unless there is a
massive storm of e-mails demanding that I clutter them up with
counters, banners, blinking ads, frames and javascript.
Main home page slightly updated today to include link to Gabgabcamcam.
Visit the Diary Farm for the diaries I've put out to pasture until they
buy the farm:
November 1998