I’ve disappeared for the last few days because I’ve been working on The Thripp Public Library. While I can’t open it to the public yet (Dad won’t open our house to the world), I’m working on it now because I have time off and Dad’s generously donated lots of his books. Though I wanted to use Evergreen or Koha, I picked the simple and obscure OpenBiblio as my library system, because it’s the only thing I could find that would run on shared hosting. I was disappointed by the lack of features to start, but I’m starting …

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I was looking for ways to optimize my website . . . to make it quicker and easier for me to maintain and update, while being fun to browse for my visitors. The problem with the old gallery and random photos at the top of each page, was that I had to make the thumbnails and update the page and database for both (I was using the this randomizer plugin for Wordpress), each time I added a photo. It was good because I’d crop, scale down, and sharpen each image to look its best, but the extra work …

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Yesterday I was contemplating what’s been holding me back in my photography and online publishing of my photography, and I’ve decided it’s maintaining my deviantart.com gallery. Since I started my own website at richardxthripp.thripp.com in December, I’ve continued to post photos to deviantART, because of my many followers there. Unfortunately, this kind of multi-casting derails too much of my time. I post each photo as prints for sale at deviantART, such as Bubble in the Sea, and that takes fifteen minutes because of their tedious interface for cropping and presentation (no one buys them). The other …

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For years, I’ve been hearing this wonderful argument: don’t put all your eggs in one basket; it’s better to have several smaller memory cards than one large one, so that if one fails, you’ve only lost a portion of your prized photographs, instead of all of them.

Seems to make sense, no? Distribution and redundancy are the core of safe computing, so we take this argument without question, spending extra to get four 512MB cards, even if the best bang for our collective buck is at 2GB. Yet do we ever stop to think that the entire concept is flawed?

The multi-card …

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