Well, I’ve decided to ftp this log to my website and might just link it to my webpage. I’ve had it linked before, but I feel a little strange just kind of talking to myself and then letting others see what I’ve been thinking. Almost like having someone read your personal journal. Most blog sites seem like rants or notes to friends, but I like the idea of storing chronological information there for my own future reference.

I have always wanted to experiment with the Basic Stamp products. I recently became aware of a new type of Basic Stamp-like product called a BasicX24 by NetMedia and so I got one yesterday along with the Development station and am quite pleased with how quickly one can develop smalled embedded projects. It’s the same cost as the Basic Stamp II, but much more capable. The language and development environment remind me a lot of Visual Basic and so the syntax and tools are very modern-looking. It takes nearly no time to make changes and get it up and running. It’s not something that you’d want to use for developing final products with because of the overhead cost of each BX24 ($49) but it’s great for prototyping ideas. It might also be appropriate for small numbers of products because it would be easy to support it. Someone with very little knowledge could easily come up to speed quickly and with a little documentation be ready to support a custom embedded design.

I am going to start posting to this web log again. Lots has happened since my last entry. Most notably, moving my web pages to a new domain k0lee.com which is a personal website based on my ham radio callsign. Since I don’t intend to change this callsign ever, it should remain the same for life. As soon as AT&T took over from @home, they decided to change the domain to attbi and my guess is that in the future, they merge or be bought out and it will change again. This has the effect of destroying all the linkages and search engine information to my site so I don’t want to go through it again. I’m very satisfied with the service I’m getting from Readyhosting and it’s working out quite well for me. I’m recommending that my friend Bob moves his web site there.

The cable modem is back up and running along with a new server and email address. I’ve kind of gotten used to Hotmail and Yahoo mail over the past week and can appreciate the ability to use them from anywhere. I’m not sure that I want to redirect all my email to my new account. I have also come to appreciate the 500MB site where I’m borrowing space from Court. I was screwing around today putting my site at home.attbi.com/~k0lee and I realized that I have to go through the inconvenience of splitting it up because they only allow 10MB per username. I had forgotten to backup the second user ID on my @home account, and was able to piece it together from files I had stored locally. It sure makes it nice when it all fits at one address.

I lost my web hosting service, email, and cable modem access all in one fell swoop on Saturday when @home went bankrupt. I never realized how inconvenient it is to move lots of data around with a dial up connection. I nearly have my web site back up and operating in a temporary location and I’ll see how it works. It sure makes me want to do all my email through a forwarding service and web pages on a web hosting service with a domain name.