(no subject)

[the_rck]

evalerie came over around 11:00 yesterday morning. She brought a lot of plants from her yard in the hope that some of them would survive transplanting and do well in my raised beds. She yanked out all the weeds in the raised beds and cut back the sage which was trying to take over. I sat and watched, and we talked. She finished around 1:00. Our original plan had involved going to lunch downtown, but we simply didn’t have time. She needed to meet someone else at 1:30, and I needed to be sure of both getting lunch and being home by 3:00. She offered to drop me off downtown so that I could do my errands anyway, but I just couldn’t see taking care of everything, including lunch, and still getting back here in time.

Cordelia, her best friend, and her best friend’s brother all got here a little after 3:00, while the cleaning lady was still working. They ended up in the basement. I think they were watching a movie for a while, and someone did some really awful sounding things with Cordelia’s friend’s violin. I rather hope it was the younger brother, but I don’t know.

Our guests were supposed to bring money for pizza, but they never gave it to me if they had it. I spent about $35 (including tip) on pizza for the five of us.

The fifth grade portion of the orchestra concert ran half an hour. The sixth and seventh grade sections were only ten minutes each. Both older groups played two longer pieces, and the teacher didn’t talk much. I think that part of the half hour for the fifth graders was her explaining what each short piece had taught them.

Scott’s father came to the concert. Scott’s mother went, instead, to an event for one of Scott’s sister’s children (probably our niece, but I’m not certain). I was the only one of the three of us able to find a seat during the fifth grade part of the concert, but the couple sitting next to me left as soon as that was done, so Scott and his father were able to join me.

Scott discovered that the battery for the videocamera has completely died. It will claim to be alive when it’s plugged into a power source and then not so much as power up when unplugged. Scott ended up using my cell phone to record the seventh grade part of the concert. We haven’t tried to retrieve the recording yet, and I’m not sure I’ll believe in it until we do.

Cordelia’s friend’s mother told me that her daughter is starting to ride the city bus alone and wants to learn the ins and outs of taking the bus to our place so that she can visit whenever she wants. The other mother also told me that she’s making a project this summer of teaching her two how to ride the buses and that she’d be more than happy to include Cordelia. I jumped on that opportunity eagerly. Cordelia needs to learn, but she’s not willing to learn from me. I’m also not sure I’m a great teacher given my anxiety levels around riding the bus.

I’m having a devil of a time trying to remember the new names for the bus routes. I’ve been calling the ones near here the #1 and #2 for twenty years, so switching to calling them the #22 and the #23 and #65 is hard. The change also makes the Plymouth Road buses more difficult as the bus that goes downtown, the #23, doesn’t cover all of Green Road. To get that, one has to catch the #65, the bus that starts at central campus. I need to remember both the #23 and the #65 as, if I’m catching a bus from campus, either of them will work to get me home. I think the #65 would be a little bit faster, but the #23 runs more often— once every fifteen minutes between 6:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. and then every half an hour until 11:15 p.m. I just try not to take the buses at night because the light inside means that I can’t actually see anything outside of the bus, and only some buses announce time points (and not all stops are time points).

Scott did the bills last night and concluded that we absolutely must cut cable as soon as we can. Right now, his intention is, if he’s not working on Saturday, to take all of the equipment to the Comcast office on Saturday. I’ve started looking a bit at other internet options. I haven’t gotten far at all, and I know Scott has done this work before, but… He hasn’t looked at alternatives for hosting our websites.

We talked a bit about the websites last night. He doesn’t think that the site with the photos and videos is still getting any use. I kind of think that that’s the most important of the three to keep and to host offsite because none of those things are backed up anywhere outside our house. The vast majority of the pictures of me and my sister were lost in a fire that destroyed the shed where our father was storing them. At this point, not counting school pictures, there are maybe two dozen photographs of us from before middle school. My father took all of the photos when my mother kicked him out, so it’s not as if she had some to make up for the ones he had that were destroyed. All the ones we’ve got now are things our grandparents and aunts and uncles just happened to have.

I’d regret letting go of my fanfic site, particularly the recs pages. I’m not sure I’m willing to do the work that would be necessary to post the recs on, say, DW. There are so very, very many of them that it would take months. Also, a friend wrote a couple of omake for Rheotaxis that I value highly. To my knowledge, they’re not available anywhere else, and I wouldn’t be comfortable posting them elsewhere without permission which I have no way of getting. Moving the website and keeping them is one thing; putting them, say, on AO3 is quite another.

The LARP website, I think, could go. We haven’t done anything to it in years, and I really don’t think, at this point, that we’re going to. We talked about crowdsourcing our rules and trying to sell our scenarios, but it would take a lot of work on my part to write down all of the rules that the players haven’t ever needed to know. I don’t know if I have the mental resources to try to do that, and I don’t know that anyone out there would actually be interested in our rule system (which only works for one or two session games with pre-generated characters). If I recall correctly, Scott made the LARP site as a class project when he was taking an html class at the local community college. At the time, he wanted it to show what he could do. That was more than fifteen years ago, and all of those techniques are obsolete, so…

At any rate, web hosting for our three sites would probably run between $5 and $12 a month. I can’t narrow it down further because I don’t know exactly how Scott set up the photo site or how much storage that needs. I don’t think that that site would get a lot of traffic even if every member of the family was visiting. There are about twenty people interested in the photos Scott and his brother have posted. The videos from his childhood have a smaller audience because I don’t think my parents or siblings will be interested. The video of my mother and her mother and brother would be interesting to a different, slightly larger audience— My uncle’s daughters and their kids, for example, might want to see him. He’s been dead for about six years now, and his grandkids won’t remember him at all. Pretty much any of my cousins on that side might want to see Grandma. We lost her nineteen years ago, and five of my cousins on that side are under thirty.

I could probably find free hosting for my fic site because it’s static html and never going to be anything else, but I’m pretty sure that would involve giving up my url and would mean needing to track terms of service and making sure I didn’t violate them. I’d really rather own the place where I put my stuff.

Anyway, for today, I’ve got a few goals— First, I have to find the damned genetics counseling paperwork and finish it. Second, I have to write. Third, I need to do some cleaning in the basement. I will probably end up doing some cat waxing in terms of looking at internet options, though.

Comcast isn’t a good option because they would only be cheaper than Earthlink for the first twelve months (and probably not even that, depending on how much we would have to pay to host our websites offsite). If we could limit our internet use to one device at a time, we could get something that would be cheaper than Earthlink, but there are three of us. The other big option around here is AT&T, but I don’t expect their prices to be better.

In Ingress news, I just got the badge for holding a portal for twenty days. The next step up on that one is steep— Holding a portal for ninety days. I think that’s pretty unlikely ever to happen unless I find a portal somewhere that’s only physically accessible once a year or something. I’m a very long way from most of the other badges. The only one I’ll likely manage soon is the one for consecutive days of hacking. All of the others are going to take months.

Comments

[kyrielle]

Depending on the size of the videos, Flickr might be an option. A free account might be sufficient, but a pro account ($45 per two years) might be better.

But while it's good for photos - and a free account would let you back up the ones you can't afford to lose! - I think it only allows snippets of video last I checked and may not be suitable for those.

I _believe_ it doesn't store the original, full-size, photo for a non-pro account, but I may be wrong. I've had pro for so long that I really don't know the details.

[garnigal.livejournal.com]

We got a DVD with old videos and pictures from one of my second cousins on my dad's side. Mostly video from when my Dad and his cousins and sibs were small, and primarily focused on his cousins because it was them that had the camera, but definitely interesting. We watched it at Xmas a few years ago, and my cousins-in-law were deeply entertained by watching these people they'd only known as their husbands' father and uncle. So I definitely agree there could be an audience for some of that old stuff.

What about burning a few copies of the pictures onto CD and storing them offsite (friends, relatives...) until you decide what to do? If you are moving the sites anyway, you will be starting from scratch. As long as you have the pictures, you can start again whenever you have the money and time.

[the_rck]

I don't expect we'll have to do much work to 'move' the sites. The urls wouldn't change, and, of course, we have copies of all the pages offline. If I had to upload my site again, I don't see how it could take more than half an hour.