Tuesday 15 June 1999

Finished the new site layout just before 4 in the morning. It is not too radical a departure from the old. I symbolized this by only setting the background color a lighter shade of the same green. Much of the text has been kept, only shuffled down to sub-pages. Also put a sample of my .jpgs on the cover page to illustrate the wide range of moods inside. Putting a large slow-loading picture splat on the index page just doesn't feel right, but at least the necessary text should be displayed before the picture starts loading, including the nav table. Not sure if I should have the latest calendar on the front too, like I see some people do, rather than at the end of each entry.

Mail me with suggestions and I will consider them. (Not that I truly believe that you would suddenly start now...)

My new Toshiba Satellite still has occasional problems with the parallel port zip drive. Today I got one hang with the drive at work, a zip that is usually OK. Luckily, I don't often need zip drives now that I have doubled my disk space again. Of course, after a while the 4.1 GB disk will be full too. By then I'm probably looking for a USB (universal serial bus?) unit, either a 250 MB zip (for backward compability) or a larger, faster, cheaper storage unit. I have had too many computers now to believe that "X MB/GB will be enough for anything". You really need to double your hard disk space every 6 months to not feel cramped. I don't do that, so I tend to go for a side order of removable disk.

A similar trend holds for modems. I have a 56 Kbps modem in my portable, and I wonder how it would feel today with the trusty old 14400 that I used for years. I don't even know where it is now. Probably someone borrowed it. Anyway, I occasionally hear that the Internet is going slower and slower. My experience is the opposite. It is getting ever faster, to the point where waiting is now hardly an inconvenience, where it once was amajor problem. Either people are just complainining from habit, like they do about the weather, or it could be that they are using Netscape browsers. I understand that these are getting gradually more bloated. Whereas I use Opera, which is small and fast. MSIE5 is also faster than its forerunners, probably due to the increasing competition from Opera. Opera has only ca 1% of the browser market (it costs money) but it repeatedly gets free press and so the giants may have become aware that their customers have a choice. I am quite impressed by MSIE5, though Opera is still better for day-to-day use. And it certainly is fast.

Theology for a new generation:
JESUS AND HIS FAMILY
Jesus had two dads, just like kids today. His first dad was God, and the second was Joseph. Joseph was a carpainter and Mary was a virgin. They had a lot to do, and little Jesus spent much of his time with God. God taught him lots of cool stuff. When he was 12, Jesus wanted to move out and live with God, but Joseph and Mary didn't let him. That's the last we hear from Joseph.