Saturday 2 January 1999
Pic of the day: Daggerfall screenshot. This is the interior of one wing of the Temple of Stendarr in Bubyrydata, far east in the Alik'r Desert. The interior varies with climate zones. The yellow text on top says: "You feel somewhat bad."
Meanwhile, back in Real Life: I've caught half a cold. Went to town today and looked around a bit, and spent a few hours on the job. Got the Forum program initialized for the new year in all three counties, it seems, and also got the new province-wide e-mail system up to date on the two small offices. Finetuned the office's web access. Not much tuning needed there.
I am impressed by the performance of the Internet now. Only a couple of years ago, things were pretty slow and not completely stable, at least here in Norway. There were few ISPs, and they had too few modems for the number of customers. Obviously they were taken by surprise, and connections were often unavailable or slow. There was only a quite limited bandwidth for international transfers, and few worthwhile Norwegian sites. The connection to the USA was particularly bad. Dissatisfied customers ranted, and of course from America came the bad news that the Net would break down in 6 months. This was before we knew that the Net always will break down in 6 months.
Today, speed is not much of a concern when I use the Internet, whether it is for gathering news, entertainment, e-mail or online games. I guess it helps that I have a Pentium-class PC, and it definitely helps to have Opera, the fastest graphical web browser alive. Unlike Microsoft and AOL, the guys and gals at Opera Software don't have any other source of income, so please buy it if you find it useful. I did. In particular, its caching system seems to be superior, so see if you can put aside a bit of disk space for it. Reserving 5-10% of your main hard disk for a cache is a good idea anyway, even if you use one of the bloatware twins. On the bright side, Opera doesn't fill 5-10% of your disk just with its code. :)
If you're not sure if your browser is running at peak efficiency, you may want to run a diagnostics with NetMedic from VitalSigns. You can try it for free for some weeks, which ironically means that you will probably not need it when it expires. But it's a simple and cool tool and should be worth its salt if you work with these kind of things on a semi-regular basis.
And with these words and a sniffle of cold, I retire for the night, while the sun marches on westward.