Ok llamas, I decided that after having had our servers down for part of the weekend, we should go to the new format that I have been working on. You llamas out there will have to let us know whether or not you think that it is cool. Loopy and I think that the new look of the site totally rocks! Nate and Bob haven’t had a chance to see it yet, it will be a surprise. We have a brand new digital camera so don’t be surprised if cool new images start coming soon. I don’t get too much opportunity to do web design so this was kind of fun. Most of my personal work on the web includes compliance issues and server administration. It is fun to do design sometimes.
You can check out one of the pages that Loopy and I have made at www.WasteWatcher.org. This was our first commercial site and we still administer it today. In addition to the new look of our site, we are hoping that our new format allows for easier navigation of the site. We have noticed that many of our surfers never noticed that we had links going to more pages. So now, everything is in text over there on the left so that you can find it easily. And, the average download time of this page should be screaming fast compared to the old graphic one. We have a fast connection here in our Ithaca office and sometimes we forget that many of you are still using dial-up connections to get to the internet 🙁 So, this should make visiting our site more enjoyable for many of you. Plus, new upgrades were added to our web servers this weekend and there should be a slight reduction in latency from our new drive subsystem (in case you were wondering what gets done around here on the weekends.) For you gear-heads out there, we added a new RAID 5 subsystem to our main web server as well as eased back on our bandwidth throttling for BITS [Later, SGL] so that our users get a more pleasent surfing experience. For you high-bandwidth users, you should notice a significant increase in speed on the site and everyone should notice a little bit of reduced latency (the time it takes from the time you ask for the page until the time that you start to get it.) Plus, our new page design loads much, much faster than the old one.
Another exciting weekend for Loopy, Joey Llama (Bob Winans) and I as we drove down to Washington, DC to work. Loopy and Bob got introduced to my favorite bar tender, JJ, who works at Island Jim’s in Brookland. If you are ever in DC and have a hankering for unusual seafood dishes, that is the place to try. Tell JJ that Scott from “Sheep Guarding Llama” sent you! JJ is there on Tuesday through Saturday evening after about 5:00 pm. Island Jim’s is closed on Mondays. Most of our weekend was spent working at the office at Washington Hospital Center. The servers that run our lovely site are located there.