Saturday 14 October 2000

Pic of the day: That's me! In a cheap old shirt missing half its buttons, and a cheap promotional caps. Heh. Even cheap, I am rather nice, I think. Of course, this could just be the fact that it's Saturday midnight and the Norwegian collective subconscious is severely drunk.

The price of cheapness

If you have clicked on my "year ago" links one of the last few days, you may have noticed that crosswinds.net has added pop-up ads. Actually, I am impressed that they held up for well over a year with no pop-ups, no banners, and unlimited free server space and e-mail. That sounded like simple philanthropy to me. Evidently they had imagined that they could live off only the ads in their common areas. Keep dreaming. Especially as people drifted to crosswinds.net from the other free webhosts with blinking and often less than decent advertisements. Well, the drifting is likely to stop now.

I also apologize for not being able to send outbound mail from my private mail accound on netcom.no - I've had one mail waiting since last night. I guess I shall have to send it from the online.no account which I use for lists and such. The mail server at Netcom has been down off and on for the last night and day, every time I tried to send. The internet connection has also been slow and pulse-like. Yes, Netcom Norway is the cheap-rate ISP. See at pattern here?

In worldly matters at least, free stuff tends to be worth what you pay for it. There is a reason why "cheap" in English means both "inexpensive" and "shoddy, poor quality".

***

It is not like this is my first chance to learn that lesson. Back in the old days, a decade or so ago, I used to only buy cheap clothes. But the shirts, made in Huangdong, dissolved in washing; and my trousers burst in their seams when I tried to lift something heavy. (Not to mention that the zippers tended to break ... that, or the nearby seams. I have come to understand that this was somehow special for me. Oh well.)

The clothes I have bought these last few years are twice or thrice as expensive; but they last for years. Even shoes last for half a year or even a whole; the cheapest I bought wore out in less than a day outdoors.

It just goes to show that it is expensive to be poor. And that cheap tends to be, well, cheap.

***

Back to the pop-up ads. Actually, I am not opposed to advertising on the Internet. I think it is an ideal solution. It may take slightly longer to download the stuff you want to read, and the ads may be a bit distracting. But it lets stupid people pay the way for the smart, and that seems to me a good thing. (The stupid people in question would be either the advertisers who waste their money on Net advertising, or the customers who are lured to buy their products based on some flashy banner. Me, I click on any ad that seems remotely useful, but so far I cannot remember having ever bought any of the products. Of course it helps that I hang out mostly on American sites, whose products are not available here in Norway.)

You may also consider to surf with Javascript off, if pop-ups and silly antics distract you. But it isn't really fair against the advertisers.

Back when I was a kid, I loved mail order catalogs and such; and when I eventually got a little money, I hurried to buy cheap stuff over mail order. (This was before the coming of the Internet, obviously.) I soon learned the basic rule of life: If something seems too good to be true, it usually isn't true.

***

In all fairness, though, greed does not rule supreme even on Earth. There may not be a free lunch, but there are free online comics (many of them available from Keenspot) and free add-ons to The Sims (some of them available from The Sims homepage, and others from sites linked from there).

And of course, you get to look into people's lives for free! :) There are thousands of online diaries and journals like this one, many of them registered in The Diarist Registry. And there are even some free web cams out there. It's been a while since I recommended GabGab, a free day & night gURLcam typically supplemented with witty journal updates. Oh, and there are cats! Huge black warrior cats. And it is as free as it gets.

But generally, most of us need to put food on our people, as they say. So by and large, there are limits to how much work anyone will put into giving you something for free. Abundant praise and flattery may help, but only so far. :)