I’ve been trying to plot a new design for the band’s site. I’m not coming up with anything. Or rather, I’ve come up with half a dozen things that I lay out and really think I’m onto something - for about a day. Then I hate it. In search of inspiration I must have looked at about a zillion music related sites. That got to be hard work after a while.

Of course, a couple of things don’t help. I’m not really a designer at all for one. I’ve got some art background, but no design training, which is a different deal altogether. I started doing this when it was more of a homebaked type of thing. There was no Flash and if you had music on the site it was a .wav file that lasted a few seconds, or a midi file, which sounded really bad. Hell…I think tables were new. Most people who put websites together weren’t trained in design then. It’s a different deal now. It’s been redesigned before, several times, in fact. But that was before they started giving me creative input.

Of course, the band itself is not much help. The creative input I get from them is vague at best. They decided they need a redesign in honor of their new logo and I can see that. I asked what they’d like. What I had in mind was being pointed toward sites they like and an idea of what kind of look they think best represents them now. You know..sleek and sophisticated, earthy, funky or what. The only one who had an answer said, “Round!”. It seems he doesn’t like right angles. The music doesn’t have right angles, you see.

On the upside, I did come up with a favicon for them. It’s my first favicon. Of course they never asked for one and I’m not at all sure they know what a favicon is, so I’m not sure that counts as progress.

I’ve had to work at various workstations for the past few weeks. Omigod, what people do to their computers! Our entire tech staff at work - for three sites - consists of one woman who also has to function as office manager at our location since cutbacks earlier this year. She must be tearing her hair out. There’s no way she has the time or the technical resources to completely monitor what people download onto their computers. Considering that, she keeps the virus count fairly low and it’s a miracle.

The first of the computers I “borrowed” has something pop up each day offering free photos from Webshots. Why in the world would you want that to happen? If you want the photos, I’d figure you’d go get them. I’m not saying that Webshots doesn’t give away nice stuff. I’m sure they do. That’s not the point. Do you really want to be nagged about it when you’re busy composing a report - or checking out Ebay on company time?

That was nothing, though. That computer is in pretty good shape. If you open a web browser on most of them, you get about half the screen because the top half is taken up with various toolbars, some of which have been installed without the user understanding what happened. I’m not talking about a Google toolbar, or even Yahoo. More often there were both of those plus obscure ones that are pretty redundant if you have one, let alone, both of the former installed. The last one had the toolbars and all kinds of windows popping up, no doubt because of some kind of malware that’s found its way onto the computer. Maybe she ran into something like the adware served by Ethernet Media, until it was shut down by the courts. Apparently it offered an “upgrade” to your browser and instead installed adware on it, as explained by Blog Herald.

Another announced a long list of virii, dating back months, when I logged on. Its usual user had never bothered to either notify anyone or to remove them herself.

And these people wonder why their machines are running slowly. Of course, it’s a mystery to me why management doesn’t just ask people to use a browser other than Internet Explorer. What the attachment to it is, I’ll never know. When there’s such a simple solution to something, it’s hard to understand not using it. When my sister’s computer got itself some kind of unasked for “feature” that was rendering the computer fairly uselss, after spending some time getting rid of it, I downloaded Netscape for her. I thought Firefox would confuse her. She was computer-phobic, but it’s getting a little better. She was able to use Netscape easily and has had no problems with the computer since then.

I wouldn’t go as far as putting Explorer Destoyer on a site of my own. That seems a bit extreme and kind of rude. But I’d sure like to see someone take steps to curtail the abuse of innocent computers.

It started out innocently enough. I was renewing the registration for u-melt.com for my son’s band’s site. It needed to be done. I was doing it. Simple, right? Then, somehow or other, by the time I was finished I’d also registered otherplans.org. So, in a few days, that should be pointing to this site. Blogsome doesn’t have domain mapping like Typepad does, as far as I know. Well, it’s free, so no complaints there. I’ll probably just use the URL forwarding that the registrar provides. I’m using it for u-melt with no problems, although I really should move the DNS on that one to the site’s host. It’s only been a year.

That domain was an accidental one, too, but it wasn’t my accident that time. The band was going back and forth between calling itself U-Melt and UMelt and somehow an important piece of advertising went out with www.u-melt.com printed on it. I got an urgent e-mail from the manager asking if we could get that registered by the time the mail arrived at its destination. Turned out we could. I turned on URL forwarding on the theory that it would be a lot quicker than having it resolve to the hosting server and it seems I never remembered to change it.

Also in a few days I should be able to receive e-mail at pat AT otherplans.org. I have to set that up, too, once the mx servers have resolved. And, I still have a year on zenyenta.com. And then there’s another one that I never use at all anymore. Oh, and I have one that was for the previous version of the band and I should try to sell. My attempts to simplify seem to be backfiring left and right.

Jason, at Signal vs. Noise, asks, Would you pay $5/month to use Google?

Well, I certainly get more than $5 a month worth of value from Google. Google search has evolved to the point where I don’t even need as many bookmarks anymore. For instance, I used to have the United States Postal Service’s zip code page bookmarked. Every so often they’d rearrange the site and I’d have to take the time to find the correct page and change the bookmark. Valuable seconds wasted! Now, if I want a zip code, I just enter “city, state, zip code” in the Google search box which is already sitting in the toolbar of every browser I use and Bob’s your uncle. The correct zip or zips appear.

Then there’s Gmail. One of my tasks this weekend is to empty out an e-mail account that I was paying for, because Gmail does everything I want it to. I can’t justify paying for an account anymore. But I did pay, and paid for several years. But Google changed all that.

What Google has done is to save the free internet, at least for now. When Google rose to prominence, search was being seriously degraded by the for-pay results that were being returned. Free services were shrinking and those that remained tried to create revenue by means of pop-up ads that rendered a lot of them virtually unusable. The free services weren’t very good, either, for the most part. Google created Ad Sense. Simple, targeted text ads. Now there are free, ad supported services for almost any need. Google has become what it is by providing free and high quality services to everyone with internet access.

So, would you pay? I’d probably pay, but it wouldn’t be the same thing at all.

Political Cortex, a new collaborative, progressive site opened yesterday. It’s operated on the Scoop platform and it aims to give a voice to all its members. If you sign up now, you can get your desired username. I got my first name. I should be able to remember that.

I don’t know how much I’ll contribute, but I read one of its writers, S.M. Dixon, on a regular basis and find his site an invaluable source of news and information, especially on busy days when there’s not much time to check everything out.

Anyway, welcome to blogtopia (yes, skippy coined that term), Political Cortex. And best of luck in your mission.

I seem to be signed up for notifications of additional comments to an old post on The Blog Herald. Two notifications in a row just arrived in my inbox and they were both for spam comments. It really pisses me off. Blogs create the opportunity for conversations that could never have happened a generation ago. There’s always someone with an angle who forces you to require registration or set up some other barrier to communication. I don’t mind trolls. Trolls are just part of the landscape, but the spam thing just makes my head explode.

Blogsome must have done something different because it’s calmed down here a lot lately, which is good. I was getting a dozen or so a day for a short period there. Blogger is doing it with word verification, but the problem with that is that the distorted letters that they use are sometimes difficult to read. I don’t mind typing in the letters that I see, but I don’t want to have to sit and think about what those letters are. Anyway, just a good morning “Boo, hiss” to comment spammers.

Gmail’s gone and added the “send from a different account” feature. They’ve been rolling it out for a few days and it’s in my account as of this morning. Just when I thought I had my addiction to e-mail addresses licked.

In case you’re the one who hasn’t heard about it, when you acquire an “Accounts” tab in Settings, you’ve got the feature. You can then add additional address as the From - not just Reply-to - address. So, your message goes out as “otheraddress@otherdomain.com” rather than your Gmail address. This has a thousand and one uses.

I’ve been hooked on web based e-mail since Hotmail appeared, and before Microsoft bought it. At first it was because the e-mail provided by my ISP took hours - sometimes days - to arrive. This was early on. I got a better ISP and started using POP again. Then people started sending out attachments for fun. Dancing babies and other animations made people pee in their pants from sheer hysteria. I blame AOL since that’s where these attachments come from. It made my e-mail stop. It would get stuck downloading one of these and dial-up couldn’t handle it. It would stall. The rest of my e-mail would be sitting in back of the queue, unread, inaccessible. I loved the way webmail sat there and waited for me to tell it what to do before downloading anything. I mostly used Netscape’s mail client back then, but if I had to use Outlook, that would really drive me crazy. I’d be thinking I was discarding a message that I’d decided not to send, but it would stick it in my Outbox and try to trick me into sending them out later on. Oh, I caught on after a while, but it was always trying to sneak one past me.

Later on, it was that my computer time was almost evenly split between home and work computers. I didn’t want set up a personal account in a client on the work machines. Also, lacking a laptop it was easier to check mail from any computer that was handy when it was on the web.

Hotmail couldn’t satisfy me for long, though. Yahoo came along with its 6 MB mailbox and I had to try it. I stayed with it for a while, but eventually I wanted something bigger and more exciting. Something - you know - exotic. After that it all became a blur for a while. I’d go to sleep with one e-mail account and wake up with another. 15 MB, then 30 with POP and complicated PIM features thrown in. I was switching around so fast that friends were talking intervention. They didn’t know where to send a message. It was a mad, crazy time. I still get e-mail flashbacks just thinking about it.

Then the downward spiral began. Free e-mail providers started going out of business. Most of those who stuck around started downsizing their free accounts. Some of them started offering paid accounts with the features the free ones had before the bubble burst. Accounts with measly 2 to 6 MB would fill up and start bouncing messages if they weren’t cleaned out every day or so.

I found Fastmail. It was in beta then. It was a revelation. Faster and more reliable than most e-mail providers, it was free with a ton of features, including an innovative web based interface, POP, IMAP and “personalities”. They were very upfront about the plan to charge eventually, and they did, but not very much. It’s still a very good deal. Fastmail has more features than I could list here, but the personalities were my favorite. By then, I had a couple of domains. You could forward your domain addresses to your Fastmail account, set up the personality for you@yourdomain.com and have all your addresses coming to one account and still appear to be sending out mail from those addresses. Easy, simple. Fastmail even automatically sets the reply to a message from the appropriate address, which Gmail doesn’t seem to do, at least as yet. I bought one domain that I thought would work for the whole family, except the other members of the family didn’t care what their e-mail addresses were as long as they could send and receive. Philistines! I bought zenyenta.com for myself, since the others weren’t interested in my address largess. And that was in addition the others. Not to mention that Fastmail gives you several aliases within their own numerous domains and subdomains as well as plus addressing.

I knew things had gone too far again when someone asked me for my e-mail address and I was as stuck for an answer as George Bush in a political debate. I was only using one account, but I had too many addresses. I was having trouble remembering which one I wanted to use for what. Oh, yes. The wretched excess was starting all over again.

Then Gmail came along in April of 2004 and redefined free e-mail. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. With a bigger inbox than the hard drive space on my first computer, it seemed like a chance to start over with a clean slate. I would just use one e-mail address for everything. First name/last name is what I finally settled on and that’s what I’ve been doing. Until now. I’m trying to be strong, but tempation just seems to chase you down.

I just noticed that this blog has been accepted to The Ageless Project. That puts it in some great company. I’m going to have to work on being worthy, as soon as possible.

Thanks very much to The Ageless Project.

Here’s what I love about the internets: almost everything. When I was getting settled into my blogger blog, I was clicking on that Next Blog thing and came across Stef Zucconi’s Famous for 15 Megapixels. I blogrolled it right away. Stef and I don’t have a lot in common. He’s younger and he’s a Londoner and his life is clearly a world apart from mine. I rarely fail to find it interesting, though. It’s well written and Stef’s takes on things always seem worth reading to me. My other blog gradually got very political, although that was not really my original intent. I started this one for the personal stuff and blogrolled Stef’s blog here, too.

After reading his latest post, I was wandering through his blogroll and found eggsbaconchipsandbeans. This is one of the truly great blogs. It’s by a Russell Davies and he devotedly, lovingly and enthusiastically reviews cafes and their eggs, bacon, chips and beans wherever he can. With pictures. And intense appreciation for detail. Talk about opening up the world. Sure, I’ve heard of beans and toast. Never seen them, but I think they’ve come up in Agatha Christie novels and may have been mentioned somewhere in an article about the Beatles I once read. And every schoolchild knows that what we in the USA call French Fries are chips in the UK. And what we call chips are crisps. I knew all that. I’m not totally without sophistication when it comes to international cuisine. But I was ignorant of eggs, bacon, chips and beans as a meal.

I could talk to you about knishes, pizza or egg creams all night, but where I come from, the way you eat eggs is with your choice of meat- bacon, ham, sausage or Canadian bacon - hash browns or homefries and toast. You may choose to forgo the meat and the occasional maverick will have steak and eggs. Eggs themselves can be done any style. The menu tells you so. Usually, though, they’re ordered sunnyside up, over easy or scrambled. That’s the way we do it in the metroplitan area of NY. The way you eat beans is with franks. Eggs and beans never meet at all. So this was truly educational. It’s the next best thing to being there.

This is the kind of thing that the internet does so well. You can pick up travel guides and learn about four and five star restaurants and you might be alerted to small cafes along the way, as a matter of necessity and budget. Magazines will report on all the foodie trends. It takes the internet to get comprehensive coverage of a single basic breakfast.

Last night I was wandering around awake for a few hours. I think I’m sort of getting back on track. But it seemed like a good idea to do something mindless. Anything requiring thought really wasn’t an option. So I decided to see what Google Earth was all about. I’ve been kind of seeing posts about it out of the corner of my mind’s eye recently. My attention was on other things and I didn’t think much about it until I happened on a blog post late last night. I visited the site and it did sound kind of intriguing. I don’t have any important uses for it, so I downloaded the free version. If you r computer has the requirements, you’ve got to get it. It’s fantastic. My favorite part is the way you “fly” from one location to another. I just took a flight across the Atlantic. Last night I zoomed in on the precise club that my son’s band was playing in, in Raleigh, North Carolina. I also learned that the people who are in my old house put in a pool.

There is no privacy anymore. The whole world can see your backyard. Not much you can do about it, but keep it in mind. With the free version you can’t really go as far as to see people. You can see cars, though, but no detail. I don’t know if the paid versions will show a lot more. Maybe. Anyway, since it’s here, you might as well play. And keep covered up in the backyard. Just in case.