Tag Archives: Internet

A Little of This, A Little of That

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I don’t have a whole lot to report, but there are a few odds and ends I can prod into a ramble.

My quest to go out and be social for twelve consecutive days has failed. The failure is less complete if you count going out past midnight as credit for the following day, but even so my goal has not been met. Still, I’ve been much less of a recluse since Christmas, and hopefully I can keep some of that momentum.

Last night I went out with Angelo to watch American Football. In my previous experience going to Zlatá HvÄ›zdá for football playoffs, the place has been packed to the gills. Not so last night. Maybe it’s because the first game didn’t start until after 10:30, maybe it’s because there wasn’t a big-name east-coast team playing. For whatever reason, the bar was pretty empty as we watched Angelo’s team, the Atlanta Falcons, take on the Phoenix Cardinals (formerly the St. Louis Cardinals, and apparently before that, the Chicago Cardinals).

“Dirty Birds! Dirty Birds!” Angelo would chant, rising from his seat on big plays to do a little bird dance. The Dirty Birds lost. After that the San Diego Chargers played, and surprisingly the bar planned to stay open for the game. Happily for the good guys, I was just too tired to stay and watch. I went over to my brother’s place and crashed where the heater can keep up with the weather. Someone should enjoy the heat while he’s in the US.

The next day, Sunday, I got on a tram without a ticket, knowing full well that Sundays are a big day for tram enforcement. The tram was right there, I didn’t want to spend time standing in the cold waiting for the next one, so I didn’t find a place to buy a ticket. I stepped onto a tram full of ticket cops. Dangit, I KNOW I saved the telephone number that lets you buy a ticket via SMS. I don’t use it because I generally don’t need the full-price ticket. But what did I save the number under? I never found it. I got busted. Bummer. Normally the tram cops pass me by even when they’re busting people, but I probably had a guilty look as I tried to cover my ass.

Since last night I’ve been Internet-free at my apartment; right now I’m heading over to the Little Café Near Home to see if the gods of digital communicatioin are smiling there.

Thanks!

An Unplanned Morning Walk

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I woke up this morning feeling refreshed. The sky was brightening outside, and no clouds were visible through the window cut into the sloping ceiling directly over my head. I got up, woke up my computer, and went to fix tea. The electric kettle quickly heated the water for my first (but certainly not last) cup, and once it was fixed I returned to my desk.

My computer was turned off. Not just sleeping, but completely turned off. Curious.

It wouldn’t start again, either. I tried a light switch, then a different light on a different circuit. Nothing. My apartment was without electricity. Consulting my phone I saw it was 8 am when the electricity had stopped, and out on the street the crews were hard at work rewiring the neighborhood. This was probably a planned outage and I hadn’t got the memo. (On previous occasions I had.)

Well, then, no electricity. No computers. Normally I’d be ok with this. I’d probably just go back to bed. But That Girl had specifically mentioned that she was going to try to stay up until I woke up, so that we could chat. I’d hate to let That Girl down. Obviously, then, if the Internet wasn’t going to come to Jerry, then Jerry could go to the Internet. After all, there is a friendly little café nearby that has WiFi. There aren’t many of them out in this neighborhood of Prague, so I feel fortunate to have one so close. Plus, they often have good tea there.

I was about halfway there when it occurred to me that today was Sunday. If the café bothers to open at all today it will be this afternoon. As I walked (trying not to interfere with the construction crews who were, in open violation of the ethical standards of state-employed construction workers the world over, hard at work), I tried to come up with a Plan B. There was none that didn’t involve public transportation and overpriced access. I stopped outside Little Café Near Home and used my phone to see if their wireless was up. At least I could email That Girl to tell her what was happening. There was the network! Hooray!

I have complained about my phone, but it is perfect for things like this. I laboriously typed out a message, then hit send. “Use cafemania wireless network?” the phone asked me. “Yes,” I answered. “Enter password,” my phone said. I typed the password, working around my phone’s bloody-minded insistence that the first letter be capitalized. Password entered, I hit “send.”

“There’s no network here named cafemania,” my phone told me.

Where did the network go? There was no one inside to turn it off. Maybe LCNH’s power was cut off just then. I laughed, shook my head, scanned for neighboring networks that were unprotected, found none, and decided to go home. I took a slightly different route home, around the worst of the construction, and met a dog who used to be a regular at Little Café Near Home, but hasn’t been coming in lately. The sun was shining, the birds were singing (probably saying “see you next spring”), and the air was chill and crisp. Bracing, even.

I got home, put some water on the gas stove, then with a click and a pop the electricity came back on, and here I am telling you about my morning.

Thanks!

Finally Getting Muddled U. Rolling

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MuddledUniversity.png

That’s right, boys and girls! Muddled University will soon be opening its doors!

As I type this I’m having technical difficulties registering the domain — it’s at that worst possible moment when you click the “pay” button and then wait. It’s been a few minutes now, and still no response. The big question, of course is “if I try again, will I be charged a second time?” Meanwhile, I need to go. What happens if I disconnect from the Internet now? Arrg.

As a side note, .mu belongs to Maruitius, a place that by all reports is quite nice — as long as you’re not a dodo. They didn’t do so well here. Funny that’s not mentioned on the tourist Web site.

Meanwhile, it’s time to get this institution off the ground! Over the next few days I’ll be fiddling with the site off an on, but what every quality institution of higher learning needs first and foremost is merchandise. I know that several of you have had suggestions in the past, but of course I’m too lazy to go find them. So, those who wish to earn the Muddled Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing, please leave suggestions in the comments below. Don’t forget the mascot, Ollie, the elevator-riding, rutabaga-eating ocelot. Dodos would also be a good tie-in.

I am also seeking students who would like degrees in graphic design and Web design. Additionally, if you feel you belong on the faculty of the Web’s Newest University, please submit your application in the comments.

Thanks!

Need a Favor

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I’ve been working on a Web site for a friend of mine, and while it currently has a pretty high degree of slickness when viewed with Firefox for Mac (it has the best debugging tools available to me), I’m curious how it will perform on various Windows browsers. Specifically:

  1. graphics – I blended the images with the background using alpha channels. I’m pretty sure this is going to look bad in Internet Explorer 6, but are there other broswers that also look bad? Can anyone confirm that they do look bad on IE6?
  2. menus – I wrote up some pretty complicated scripts to make animated menus, but I’m not sure how they’re working on other broswers. For instance, on the Leadership Coaching page, there are three drop-down menus. Do they work?
  3. sub-menus – On the lowest menu on the Leadership Coaching page (beneath the picture), does a submenu appear to the right when you roll over the top menu item? (The sub-menus are currently clipped off in Safari and Opera for Mac, which I will fix tomorrow.)

Now I remember why I don’t do Web…

I’ve only spent a little bit of effort trying to make the site aesthetically appealing – mainly I’ve been playing with the CSS to figure out HOW to make the text nice, without really worrying too much about the actual result. I’m really, really trying to make aesthetics Someone Else’s Problem. Still, there are some design elements that aren’t bad for an amateur. I’ll be working on a more consistent color scheme, but what are your thoughts?

Thanks in advance! The link is Eu-LIFE. If things look really weird to you, let me know and I’ll post screen shots to help you describe what’s different.

Thanks!

My Favorite Web Comics

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It used to be, back in the day, that when I got the newspaper in the morning, the first thing I would read was the comics. Occasionally one would even be funny. My days of newspaper subscriptions are long past, but lately I’ve been starting my day the same way I used to, thanks to the Internet.

The list of comics I check each morning is fairly long — many of them only update once a week, so to get a good bit of comic-reading done each morning requires a large sample. There are a few, however, that give me a special thrill of anticipation when I see a new comic is up. Here, then, is a list of my faves, in no particular order. Check them out!

Girl Genius — A very popular Web comic that takes place in a steam-punk sort of world were there are a few people known as “sparks” — people with a level of mechanical genius that borders on magic. The spark has the unfortunate side effect of driving people mad. Yep, the world is being torn apart by mad scientists. Agatha Clay has a bit of the spark in her, but there seems to be a lot more going on as well. This comic has some darn good storytelling, beautiful artwork, and is overall a slick and professional publication. It’s worth starting from the beginning.

Order of the Stick — From an artistic standpoint, this is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Girl Genuis; the characters are all stick figures. The action takes place in a medieval sword and sorcery world, and the humor is heavily weighted with Dungeons and Dragons references. The characters, for instance, find nothing odd with the idea of making a saving throw during a battle. That’s how combat works, right? If you’re even somewhat familiar with the game (I have only a passing knowledge of it) you will find this comic very funny.

Scary-Go-Round — A very silly modern fantasy. I like it for the completely nutty events, the terrifically odd twists of phrase, and the general Englishness of it. For the last few episodes it’s been filler, so go back a ways if you want to get the real feel of it.

Alien Loves Predator — Although no new episodes have come out in long enough that I think we can declare the comic dead, it’s still worth reading through the archives. It is inspired, I assume, by the movie Alien vs. Predator; this story has the two sharing an apartment in New York. Hijinks ensue. Artistically, this is a great example of a relatively new comic trend; the art is done by photographing action figures.

Dr. McNinja — Off-the-wall ninja humor. I’m not that impressed with the art, but you have to tip your hat to a writer who has a hero who’s a doctor and a ninja, has a gorilla for a receptionist, occasionally rides a velociraptor, and has for a sidekick a boy who grew a big mustache through sheer force of will. His showdown with Ronald McDonald over the McNinja burger was awesome. Recently he just stopped zombies from overrunning the town, although regrettably one was the zombie of Benjamin Franklin’s clone.

Kagerou — Wow. Start with a protagonist with multiple personality disorder who finds himself in a strange fantasy world and go from there. Entire chapters of the story take place inside his head. Who knows? Maybe the whole story is happening in there. This story is packed with interesting characters and is very well-drawn in addition to being well-written.

There are a few more drama-oriented comics I read, but, like American TV series, these seem inevitably to bog down in all the characters being unhappy about who’s dating whom. When characters start to accuse each other of being tedious, maybe it’s time for the writer to figure out that readers are forming the same opinion. Also, with more complicated stories or extended action sequences, updating only once a week doesn’t cut it. A sword fight should take less than a month to conclude. A few comics I’ve shelved until enough new episodes are up that I can read them with some hope of continuity. Some of those have been on the shelf a long time; I suspect I am finished with them.

So those are the ones that popped into my head unbidden. There are some other comics I read that are pretty good, but that list should keep you out of trouble for a little while.

Honorable Mentions:

  • No Rest for the Wicked – you do NOT want to piss off Little Red Riding Hood
  • Choping Block – not for everyone. A gruesome one-joke comic that makes me laugh.
  • Sideways – beautiful woodblock style of art and intersting story. I’m not sure how much of what’s going on I’m supposed to understand.

Thanks!

Tool Recommendations?

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Over at WritersMarket.com they have a database tool to help you track what you’ve submitted where,  what its status is, and what’s on your to-do list, submissions-wise. It is integrated with their listings, which makes it particularly easy to track submissions to markets who list there.

I was a big fan of the tool before they upgraded it.

Now the tool is much less useful than it was before. Gone are quick ways to list information by status, to sort and filter the information in a number of ways. Nowhere I can find the ability to track submissions to markets not listed with them. The upgrade is cumbersome and unwieldy, and is frustrating enough that it is turning into yet another bit of resistance when I resolve to get more submissions out. It’s still better than anything else I’ve tried — if I had first experienced it in its current state I’d probably think it was the bee’s sneeze, but I just get so annoyed when there’s something I could do before that I can’t now.

Of course, what I really need is an intern. He or she could use whatever system they wanted to track things, as long as it was a system. I already have help with the printing and mailing, but every agent wants something slightly different, and now I’m not even sure which non-WritersMarket-listed agents I’ve already sent stuff to.

The problem with the intern idea: who? Who in their right mind has a few hours a week to comb through listings, create to-do lists for an easily-distracted guy and then cry in quiet anguish as that same muddled guy doesn’t get them done? It doesn’t help that I can’t afford to pay an intern anything. The only demographic I could come up with was someone hoping to break into the agenting biz and wanting to get a good look at things from the author’s side while learning about submissions, formatting, and slush. Of course, those people could learn more, make better contacts, and so forth, by being an intern to an actual agent. So, not much hope there.

I suppose there might be someone who wanted to become an agent who, upon reading my lyrical and transporting prose, after coming to identify with my characters so deeply it will affect their child-naming strategies in years to come, might want to be my intern to ride my coattails in my inevitable meteoric rise to greatness. Yeah, that could work.

Finding someone with the right combination of delusion and desperation, yet is still together enough to pull off the job, seems like a long shot. I’m probably stuck with software, which brings me (at last) to the point of this post. Are there any writers out there with a submission-tracking tool they like? I’d write one myself (how hard could it be?), but I’ve already got a word processor to maintain.

Unless it was integrated with the word processor…

Thanks!

Bannned in China!

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According to Great Firewall of China, it is likely that Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas (as https://muddledramblings.com) is blocked in China.

*sniff!* It’s good to be noticed.

But then again, why not? What is Muddled Ramblings, if not a celebration of the freedom of the human spirit, of the deeper meanings of seemingly simple actions, of rebellion and art, individualism and choice? It is a place where there is no thought too radical, no dissertation too convoluted, no idea too stupid to be aired out and discussed in free and open debate.

We here in the Muddleverse exist to challenge the status quo, to look at the myths that built America, then go beyond merely looking at the myths and embrace them with prenostalgic fervor, lamenting the loss of something we never had. We stack rocks to build an altar to the open road, then hold a belching contest while basking in the grandeur. We embrace — no, we demand — the right to be self-contradictory and generally incomprehensible.

What totalitarian government could stand in the face of this? What recourse do they have but to silence this voice of freedom before it reaches the ears of their benighted citizens? People are to freedom as tigers are to human flesh: Once they taste it they can never go back.

It is probably only a matter of time before other governments tremble in fear before this bastion of freedom, this open rebellion against tyrannies of every shape, be they transnational corporations, democracies for sale, or ruthless dictatorships. And you, my friends and faithful readers, were there at the start. I’m sure your names are already on lists somewhere, to be rounded up and exterminated at the first opportunity.

Sorry about that.

Thanks!

Infinology bites.

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Infinology is the Web hosting company that carries Piker Press. More than a week ago, Piker Press stopped working. Since then the editors over there have tried through various channels to get help. Nothing. Zip. Nada. No one is answering the phones, no one is responding to the help tickets. This would to my untrained eye make the claims they make on their Web site downright fradulent.

So, to summarize: Infinology sucks. They are liars as well as bad Web hosts. Don’t even think of using them.

Thanks!

O2 SUCKS!

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O2 is my internet service provider. It used to be České Telecom, and back when I was dealing with a Czech company, things were working fine. (Note that this is contrary to all logic as we know it.) Now that ČT has been sucked into a giant pan-European company, my service has gone steadily downhill. Most of the time I’m still connected, but there is no DNS. If I happened to know the IP addresses of all the sites I wanted to visit, I’d be fine. (DNS is like a giant automatic phone book that takes text like jerssoftwarehut.com/ and looks up the string of numbers that identifies the correct machine on the Internet.)

In my setup I can enter an alternate IP address for DNS. I’d like to try that to see if it helps, but I’m not sure what to put there. Any of you techno-geek people know the IP of a reliable DNS?

Now if I could only post this…

Thanks!

Suddenly the Internet is hard to come by

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Since the flood my Internet connection has been flaky on the good days. Today was not a good day. I’m not sure the problem is flood-releated; there was a bad period a month ago as well. Still, the flood couldn’t have helped. (One confirmed casualty was the splitter to allow the phone and the modem to share the line. Perhaps that is related to the current troubles.) Happily the Little Café Near Home recently added WiFi (pronounced in this neck of the woods as wee-fee). I gathered up my gear and headed out through a light rain.

Before I even got there I knew that I was heading for a disappointment. As I approached up the sidewalk the first thing I noticed was that the security grill was closed over the big window. The next thing I noticed was the sound of a jackhammer coming from inside. Renovations are under way. That’s cool, but not really convenient for me tonight. The bowling alley’s out – they are hosting a private party tonight. Their network has been sporadic lately as well; I think one guy is playing with the security settings but isn’t telling anyone else what he’s up to. On top of all that, I had pizza to go from the bowling alley last night, and as much as I like those guys, there is a limit.

I’m at U Kormidla right now, where I just had a very nice chicken dish that was not at all what I expected. Upstairs there’s a party of some sort going on; things are festive and they just relocated the plasma TV. Looks like there’s going to be a show. The downstairs is packed, and I’m feeling a little of that American guilt over sitting at the table sipping another tea while people are turned away because there’s no space.

On a marginally related note, on Saturday I’ve been invited to join a family for a meal. It’s the mother of one of the regulars at Little Café Near Home (for a while I though he was setting me up with her, but fortunately that doesn’t appear to be the case). The only catch is that I have no way to contact them. I hadn’t worried about it, I knew that even if I didn’t run into Martin that there were plenty of other Little Café regulars who would have his number. That was on my to-do list for today. That leaves the question, where does a Little Café regular go, when there’s no Little Café? That will be my quest for the rest of the night.

Thanks!

I have a bad feeling about this…

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Today the words aren’t coming very quickly, so I decided to take a short break and do a little career upkeep. WritersMarket.com has a feature called Submission Tracker which allows you to follow the progress of your work, tracking where you have submitted it, where you plan to submit it next, and things like that. With a click you can see a list of all the places you are waiting to hear back from, or all the manuscripts that are sitting around gathering dust rather than out there working.

Make that “could”. It’s been a while since I logged on over at WritersMarket.com, and there have been changes. I had a few beefs with the Submission Tracker, but I wasn’t looking forward to having to figure out a new system. As I poked around, my stomach began to twist up into a little knot. There was a section called My Manuscripts. So far, so good. I clicked and got a list of the works I’ve entered into the system to track. Only — the list seemed shorter than I thought it ought to be. Nevertheless, each entry had a link to “view submissions”. Not as versatile as the old system, but — what the #@$%$!!!. All the submissions have the status “active”! I can’t tell which places have rejected the manuscript, and which were the ones I planned to submit to next! I can’t tell which manuscripts have been published, and where. I can’t tell which agents have see The Monster Within, which are still considering it, and which have rejected it.

It appears that all submissions that were not linked directly to current WritersMarket.com listings are gone. That means, for example, that all my submissions to Piker Press are missing. If that was the only submission for the piece, then the manuscript itself is also gone from the list.

Still there are twenty-four submission entries for Monster. Some of those should show as rejected, but several were there for my next round of submissions. Now I don’t know which is which. And agencies not listed on WritersMarket.com? Information on agents and agencies I’d gathered from all over and consolidated there is now gone, along with any hint that an agent may or may not have seen my work already.

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe the information is there and I just didn’t know how to find it. Maybe the transition to the new system isn’t complete yet. Maybe. The help system just says “coming soon.” I sent a message to customer support, so maybe in a couple of work days they’ll clear things up.

Right now, I feel ill.

Follow-up:
I just got a nice note from the WritersMarket.com support team saying that my data had been carefully preserved, but would not be available online for two more weeks. They attached a spreadsheet with my info as well. That is a massive relief, as well as an excuse to slack for two weeks. They also asked me if they could contact me for feedback about the new system. I replied that I have opinions on everything, and am happy to share. So, at this time I’m guardedly optimistic that everything will turn out all right.

Thanks!

Internet Explorer 7 is officially out.

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Better, but not that great. It renders this page mostly correctly; the deficiencies are minor and overlookable. So that’s good. For Instance, the bottom of the ampersand in the logo is cut off, but while it’s not as stylish, it looks a hell of a lot better than it did before. That is where my adventure began. In the end, my first day with the new version of the software left me befuddled.

Then I noticed that my “Now Playing” section wasn’t working on IE. The way that content is generated is a bit hokey, so I thought it might be a good time to clean up the script. I figured that would probably fix the problem with IE at the same time.

Allow me to interject that the worst language for programming computers ever invented is AppleScript. They try to make it read like “real English”, like you’re chatting with your computer. As mentioned here many times, real English is about nuances, about color and shade, not black and white. As such, it’s not well-suited as a programming language. What Apple ended up with was a syntax that has the same old rigid rules, along with a hell of a lot of verbal clutter and words that don’t always mean the same thing. But I digress.

I cleaned up the script that generates the script that the browsers load to show what music I’m listening to at the moment, and I learned a couple of things along the way. The code is better than it was before, and I will be able to improve it further rather easily. So, that’s cool. I was mildly disappointed that the result still did not work on Internet Explorer 7. I suspected I knew why, but I wanted to see the IE error messages to make sure. I couldn’t find them. I was looking for some sort of window with a list of errors and any other output from the script. I went through all the menus, but could find nothing. I dimly remembered having to set a preference in previous versions of explorer to turn on the Javascript Console, so I…

Wait a minute… where are the preferences?

As far as I have been able to discern, there is no preference window in Explorer. Now, in one sense that’s a good thing. It’s been a design philosophy I’ve been using in Jer’s Novel Writer: put the settings next to the task. But what about the settings that apply to the program itself? Maybe the preferences are there and I just missed them. There were lots of cases where controls were in unfamiliar places.

Which brings me to a lament that is more about other software developers. There was a time when every program’s controls were different. One of the most revolutionary things that the mac introduced was providing a standard way to interact with software. Love the mac way or hate it, it dramatically reduced the learning curve for new applications, and you didn’t have to remember where everything was for each application. The Windows world followed suit, and for a long time computing was just a bit easier. That is breaking down now. I first noticed it on media players for Windows. They look slick, but in many cases important controls aren’t even visible until you move the mouse to a specific area. Menu bar? Forget it. Now it seems even Microsoft is sacrificing simplicity for slickness.

Right, then. One option I did find was to look for extensions for Explorer. The light came on over my head. Somewhere there would be a tool that would let me look at console output from a script. I went to the site, and there was Developers Toolbar. Hooray! I downloaded it, installed it, and discovered several useful tools, none of which were a script console. It was a nice addition, and absolutely free from Microsoft, but not the addition I was looking for. (Having this as a separate download is another design philosophy I agree with. Provide the core and let people add on the parts they need.)

About then I noticed the little error message down at the bottom of the window. Silly me! It was there all the time. I clicked the error icon. Nothing. I right-clicked the icon. Nothing. Now that is just bad design. Microsoft themselves led the charge to make “if you see something you want to interact with, right-click to see your choices” a standard. I concluded that the icon was for informative purposes only, and that somewhere else I would find the explanation of the errors. Only later did I double-click the icon to cause an error window to pop up. More bad design. Double-click is to perform the default action on a selectable item. This is simply a button, and nothing more. You don’t double-click buttons. (You also don’t put right-click menus on buttons, but once the single-click didn’t work I assumed it wasn’t a button, and tried to treat it as an item with more than one action. When the one-action behavior failed, then the multiple-action behavior failed, I assumed there were no actions.)

The window opened up and said there was a problem on line 2 of the file. Line 2 is blank. The “next” button in the little window was dim, so I didn’t realize for a moment that pressing “previous” brought up an error message dealing with line 700. “Object Expected” the error said. There was a “hide details” button, but what passed for detail wasn’t. Could I please just see a list of errors (instead of a little window where I have to click through them) and any debug information I might want to send out? The root error is ultimately my fault, but is it asking too much to make it easier to find, especially since the scripts work on all the browsers whose error reporting doesn’t suck? (Yes, I searched for other downloadable extensions. If anyone out there knows of a solution, I would be grateful.)

I guessed that there must be something wrong with the way I wrote the script tag. Luckily, one of the cool features of the Developer’s Toolbar is a validator. You can do this easily enough anyway, but right there was a way to submit your site to w3c and get back a full report card of your compliance.

I ran the report and had a bucketload of non-compliant code. I wasn’t that surprised, as the original blog template was done a while back by someone else, the comment system is someone else’s code, the Amazon links weren’t compliant, and so on and so forth. There were plenty of errors of my own doing as well, including some stray markup in a paragraph complaining about Microsoft’s non-compliance to standards. When I saw that error my mind was made up. Time to clean house! I went through the template, modifying (almost) all the markup to match standards, paying particularly close attention to script tags. Almost all of them were using syntax that was at best out of date. Not any more, baby! I brought them all into the modern age, something I would not have done were it not for Internet Explorer 7.

The result: users of Internet Explorer will have to use Firefox to post comments telling me what I’ve done wrong, because now all the Haloscan script tags are broken in IE. “Object Expected.”

1

Thanks!

Too many ones, too many zeroes

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A couple of days ago the business end of Jer’s Software Hut went down. I got the message “Your bandwidth limit has been exceeded. Please contact your system administrator as soon as possible.” It turns out that for Liverack, my hosting provider, “as soon as possible” translates to “never”, even when you’re trying to give them more money. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I don’t think their hearts are in the business anymore. In the past they had been very responsive, and I wondered how they could have a business that charged so little and maintain that level of service. I guess I got my answer.

Is there a silver lining to this cloud? is my bandwidth limit getting blown more and more quickly an indication of success? Not… so much. While the rest of the Web clamors for Google’s attention, the Goog is loving me to death, downloading several times the entire site’s worth of data each month. This does not include the application download, which is already on another server.

So jerssoftwarehut.com/ will be moving soon, to a server maintained by a Friend of the Hut. I tried to ask Google how I could help them spider the site more efficiently (it costs them also), but got no response. My question was such an outlier on the forum I thought it might get some notice by insiders.

Not being able spend my days combatting spammers on the Jer’s Novel Writer forums, I suddenly had a lot of extra time on my hands. Good timing for it, as I wanted to get a new release up, even if most people won’t hear about it until the hutsite comes back to life. I retired to the Secret Lab, located on an island of stone on a river of magma, drifting through the network of grand, eerily-lit caverns deep beneath this quiet Prague neighborhood, and prepared a release. When all was ready I called to my misshapen assistant, “Raise the software to the server!” “Yes, master!” he called as he shuffled to a giant switch mounted on a stalagmite and threw it in a shower of blue sparks.

We waited.

And waited.

You see, The Hut’s Internet provider also imposes a bandwidth limit. When you reach this limit, the connection continues to work, just very, very, slowly. Remember dialup? I do now.

Too many ones, too many zeroes. The file will be up before you are able to read this.

Come Wednesday all will be well again, and I won’t have the need to do the same large downloads I did this month to get my mini set up. Also I’ll use lower-bitrate Internet radio options. Soon everything will be hunky-dory, and the ones and zeroes shall flow again.

Thanks!

Vanity Googling Hits Pay Dirt

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Today I was poking around on that big ol’ Internet thing, and I decided to Google ‘gizo’. He is the Millennial Office Holder and all. It turns out that the top reference that refers to a human being is our gizo, but there are several links to an island in the Solomon chain that come in ahead of him. It’s not much, but I offer this link to gizo‘s home page to help boost his ratings, and to encourage folks here to drop by and say hello over there.

Yes, I know that gizo probably doesn’t care where he ranks on Google.

Then, of course, I searched my own name, and I was nineteen out of the top twenty matches. This is what happens when the spelling of your name is an unusual variant and you’ve been cluttering up the Web for a long time. Ancient threads about Java coding practices, links to this blog, imdb listings, my photo gallery, and so forth. One link caught my eye, though, that spurred me to write this episode. It is from the Web site of a major European university, giving course materials for a class on American literature and culture.

An excerpt:

John Updike, Rabbit, Run

Report 1: Give a brief presentation of 1950s conformity.
Suggested sources:
U.S. Department of State, “The Culture of the 1950s“
“1950s: Pop Culture Explodes in a Decade of Conformity“
“Social Trends of the 1950s“

Report 2: Comment briefly on the value placed on the open road in American culture.
Suggested source:
Jerry Seeger, “American Road Myth 01“

So the oldest University in the Nordic countries is using my writing as a source when discussing John Updike. I think that’s pretty darn cool. Makes me think maybe I should get around to writing more of that intended series. Purely coincidentally, the short story I’m noodling on right now is rooted firmly in that mythos.

Thanks!

You may not be able to read this.

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I just got word from my service provider that something went wrong when processing my payment for this site. My current payment expires today, and if I don’t get it resolved in time there will be a blackout in the Media Empire. So if you don’t see this message, that’s why.

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Thanks!