I’m sure all of you have noticed how lethargically slow my site is. First of all, I would like to know how the performance is from other places, as my personal connection is pretty unreliable to test a site with. But, I also wanted to know some other things, as I am thinking about switching hosting companies.

1) Do you find the site noticeably slower than other sites?

2) Would you visit this site more if the speeds were faster?

Please give me some comments on this, because changing hosting companies is a pretty big deal, especially since I am running two databases now within my site. Let me know what you honestly think.

thanks!

Mike Davidson has done a much better job of articulating the horrific design problem that is known as myspace. He has actually worked to create a better looking myspace page by hacking the code. Check out his blog, it’s good to know that other people are worried about the atrocious design of myspace. Also, check out clipmarks.com. It is a new bookmark, networking site that is pretty interesting. If you use del.icio.us or other bookmarking sites, you will enjoy clipmarks. It has built in message boards and comments so you can talk about various sites…rather than just bookmarking them.

First of all, I would like to apologize for my recent rantings on seemingly mundane and insignificant matters such as internet service providers and browsers. With my first year review rapidly approaching, I find myself more and more cynical and just plain bitter about many things. I realized how bad it had gotten when I drove home from school yesterday and glanced at the jungle-like grass that has been growing in my front yard for the past two and a half weeks. For the first time in my entire life, I was actually looking forward to cutting the grass. This feeling has never manifested itself within me. From the very beginnings of my grass cutting experience, around the age of 8 or 9, I have always dreaded the mundane chore of grass cutting. Now the chance to get outside and perform the thoughtless task of pushing a motor with a blade on the bottom around the yard seemed like a glorious vacation from my stressful life. I mowed the grass that day faster than ever before because I was so angry and stressed about everything in my life, I just pushed the mower faster and faster, well, until I ran over the septic tank flush pipe.

However, I began this post to express my thoughts on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and why it sucks. If you are still using this browser, please, please, please stop now! It is completely outdated and riddled with security flaws. It does not provide support for many new web design coding techniques, and often displays web pages incorrectly because of this. For instance, my main photo site will not display correctly in IE because it doesn’t support some CSS tags, and I am not going to take the time to code the site in two different formats. So, in short, please download firefox, or opera, or flock, or any other current browser that is still in development. Apparently Microsoft is addressing these issues in IE7 which will be released with Windows Vista. But, until then, save yourself the trouble and stop using IE if you still are.

I would like to start this post by stating that mediacom is the most pathetic excuse for an internet service provider that is operating in America. I cannot begin to express the joy that I recieve every time I write them a $40.00 check for “high-speed” internet access. I just love giving my money to a brood of hypocritical liars. 3MB/sec cable internet? You have got to be kidding me. Google’s homepage has been attempting to load for the entire time I have been writing this post. (Over 20 minutes now) Let me just perform a speed test. Right now, at 4:12 PM on Saturday afternoon, a time when your network should be the least stressed. Oooh….the results are in….and my speeds are 240kb/sec down and 197kb/sec upload. All I can say is UNBELIEVABLE!! That is a mere 12.5 percent of what my speed should be!! So next month, I will write you a check for $4.80, which is 12.5 percent of what you are charging me a month. Now for those of you who are thinking, “why are you complaining about this? go outside and enjoy the beautiful day…ya schmuck!” That is all fine and dandy in the middle of the summer when you can frolick around a meadow of wildflowers while holding your girlfriend’s hand, but I have 18 days until my first year review in grad school, and I am trying to do research online. I love your rambling excuses every time I call you to complain about the service…”oh yeh, we are working on getting the new fiber optic node installed and we are moving people off of your grid.” Ok, you were doing that 2 months ago. And my favorite is, “well, we can’t tell how many people are on the network because so many college students are behind routers.” Well, thats not my problem, I live in a house with one computer in a non-student populated area of the city. We need more bandwidth you idiots!! I find it hard to believe that you can’t provide quality internet to a town with a population of 25,000 people. Get more equipment, get more cables, get more nodes, get more fiber optics…or charge me less for your below average service. So thanks mediacom…for holding a monopoly on internet access in Carbondale and providing shameful service. You have further validated my faith in corporate America.

Since I enrolled in grad school, I have somehow managed to stop photographing as much as I used to. This is very disheartening and alarming. However, what I find very interesting is how many of my friends in grad school have been experiencing the same thing. Personally, I have found it very difficult to come up with an idea for a project that I find myself interested in and passionate about. The sad thing is that at this level, photography cannot be about simply taking pictures. Now it must be about ideas, theories, and culturally relevant issues. This concern causes me to doubt every photograph that I normally would have taken, I analyze the possibility of taking the picture before actually composing and capturing the image. While this can be advantageous sometimes, I find it can also be very detrimental to the creative process.

I have found that ideas are never conceived by sitting down and consciously trying to “think,” but rather through conversation and everyday experiences. Much in the same way, good photographs or interesting photography projects are not conceived by sitting down, but rather by getting out and photographing. The natural creative process is an ebb and flow, some things work, and other things simply don’t work.

Today, for the first time since I have been in Illinois, I really enjoyed photographing. As I was driving to Wal-Mart to purchase a lawn chair and a case of Mountain Dew so I could sit on my slab of concrete on the back of my house and catch some rays (in honor of Costello and Eric), I noticed that many of the parking lots around town were completely empty due to it being Easter. Something caught me visually and I thought about photographing these spaces with the idea of a “holiday.” What is a holiday? A break from something? A respite from everyday life? It was interesting to think that on a holiday when many people are spending time with their families, the commercial centers of town were completely empty. The cars that always littered the lots of our local mall were gone, leaving a vast open landscape of colored lines and landscaped “islands.” So I photographed, and I enjoyed it. I got kicked out of the mall parking lot, but not until after I had exposed 1 roll of film. It was a good day. photos coming soon.

So I signed up to myspace today, simply because I was getting angry at not being able to see my friends blogs and other content. In accordance to my last post about myspace, I was again completely disappointed with the myspace site and their apparent lack of concern regarding design and layout. Oh, and when I finally signed up, after skipping all of the requests to add pictures, invite friends, and talk incessantly about myself in my profile, I realized that I have one friend…named Tom. I do not know Tom. I do not know where he came from, or how he became a friend of mine, but apparently we are friends according to myspace. Tom is from California and apparently he is pretty popular. He has 70610599 friends as of 11:34 PM on April 12th. That means that Tom knows a fourth of the entire population of America. But, I do not want to be Tom’s friend. Why do I need a default friend? It says he is supposed to help me with myspace, but I find it pretty forward of him to classify himself as my friend when I have never met this Tom. Anyways, here is my profile.