Conrad the Computer never sleeps.

Yes folks, this computer gets booted up at about 4:30 every morning and I do my diary entry, check my e-mail, check the bike club's e-mail, fool with the bike club's web site, and fool with my own web site. Then I generally leave it turned on all day and check my e-mail again every few hours or so. Then my wife generally has a few things to do with it in the evening.

It's a Micron Home MPC with an early model slowpoke Pentium processor, but it does the job. We get onto the Intermuck via a second phone line, which is sorta slow, but it works. I'm still using Netscrape Navelgazer 4.5, which is somewhat bug-laden, but it usually works okay. I've also got a Microshaft Exploiter on this thing, so I could use it to get to Microsoggy-specific web eyesores, but I usually don't bother. Hey folks, if you can't design your site to be bruiser non-specific, you don't deserve to get visited.

And here's another Intermuck practice that aggravates me! Remote addressing of pictures that you oughta have downloaded and addressed locally. I can think of lotsa reasons why you oughta download all your pix and grafix and then address them locally instead of remotely.

It's easier to type in the address and then make sure you've got it right. Obviously, typing in "dorque.gif" is lots easier than typing in "http://www.worthington.com /cramshaw/ hoorah/ whatever/ images/ pictures/ football/ leanto/ theleft/ leanfrom/ theright/ standup/ sitdown/ fightfight/ mypix/ whoever/ dorque.gif" on just about anybody's keyboard.

It makes your page load lots faster for folks like me who use slowpokey phone lines. It's sorta like going to one store for both butter and eggs even though butter is a nickel a pound cheaper at one store and eggs are three cents a dozen cheaper at the other, because you're gonna save a whole lot on gas money.

It frees you from the fuss about when one of your sources of your various and sundry pix decides to re-host their directory, leaving you wondering why you've suddenly got all those nasty broken picture symbols all over your web page.

It's lots nicer to folks that are approaching the edge of the bandwidth of the service they're paying for. Access to a site, no matter how it's addressed, is paid for by the site owner, not by the person doing the accessing. So, by downloading all your own pix, you're not costing yourself a bit extra at all, but you might be saving the pix owners a bit of extra access charges.

It's nicer to everybody who uses the Intermuck. Each page load that accesses more than one directory is sending more than one address request somewhere round and about the Weird Wild Web and thus needlessly bogging it down, and anytime we can make our site more accessible with fewer address requests we're doing our fellow Intermuckers a service.

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