2008 — 31 December: Wednesday
A current upload transfer speed of 107 bytes per second suggests I'll be wasting my time trying to publish another photo of Christa tonight. I'll try again later.
Need lubricant!
Imagination may be the best pathway through troubled times (Malcolm Bradbury, apparently) but I've seen six "15 seconds without response" warnings just during the process of logging into the web server this morning. It's 10:15, and looks horribly frosty out there still.
I've just retested the connection speed to compare it with the result last November:
Evidently the problem lies somewhere at my hosting service (web and mail server) as other connections seem normal.
Suddenly it's later
In fact, it's 16:49 and getting steadily darker. I nipped out to do a spot of shopping earlier and to fill the car with "motion lotion". I've also cleaned the bits of it I need to be able to see through, or shine lights through. The rest of it is pretty muddy, to be honest. It remained stubbornly -2C if the porch thermometer can be trusted, so I put it back into the garage until I set off for furrin parts in a couple of hours. Cathy is hosting an "8 till late" gathering like last year.
Now, I like to learn something every day. Today's factoid is that there are five separate flavours we can taste: sweet, bitter, salt, sour, and — the new one to me — glutamate (or "tasting delicious"). Must be true; it was just on the radio.
Various spies have explicitly and implicitly managed to confirm that "molehole" is behaving itself as far as its http server goes. Heidi, for example, says she's spent a couple of hours catching up on the diary, and Mike says pages are loading "instantly". Emails have been trickling in, but it's still taking unusually long to confirm that new ones are setting off for their intended destinations.
Primate is as primate does
Listening to a news report from the Gaza strip last night made me weep. But, just possibly, there is some hope of saner behaviour. If savanna baboons can manage to get along, perhaps we can? (I already host a couple of quotations by the author, here, by the way.)