I’m a fan of The Police and many of Sting’s solo works. Years ago I stumbled upon an excellent site called Stingchronicity and thought I’d check in and see what’s new. It had excellent visuals, event links, interviews, and lots of other great content. Truly the best fan site out there.

Well, nothing is new because the site no longer exists, or better said, it redirects to sting.com.

Why the closure? I dug into the Wayback Machine and found the coda on July 8, 2001. Something about a rival site called stingus.com giving the webmasters grief and an odd tirade about getting eight virus-infected porn emails every day. That’s nothing by today’s standards.

Off I went to stingus.com and it, too, seemed to close up shop toward the end of 2002. Now the domain is parked with a bunch of ad links. More digging and I came across stingus.net which seems to have carried the torch for the .com of the same name.

I absolutely love the open-source project Gallery2. It’s full-featured, extensible, and compatible with a number of CMS and blogging systems. But all this goodness has a drawback: maintenance. Every month or two I have to backup the database and source files because of a security update. Then I realize I have over 300 MB of images on my host that I should be backing up in the event some yahoo hacks the site.

One day it dawned on me: I don’t have time for this.

Whether Gallery2 is the best thing since sliced bread or not, I take photos for enjoyment and maintaining software doesn’t fall into my definition of fun.

I started to rebuild my photo galleries in Fotki. It doesn’t have all the bells-and-whistles of Gallery2 but they maintain the system, back it up, even provide a means to sell photos and purchase inexpensive prints. After months of rebuilding my photo albums the Fotki-based photo gallery is ready to show.

You may notice the gallery looks nothing like a generic Fotki site. I spent a couple of hours hacking my WordPress theme to work with Fotki’s co-branding feature. Aside from a few errant DIV tags which Fotki needs to fix, it was easy and didn’t require me to learn the syntax of a theme engine.

Finally I can focus on taking great photos, which is after all, the point of a photo gallery.

EDIT: At the moment the photo gallery does not match because I can’t make up my mind about a blog theme. One day I tell you.

According to EarthLink’s web-based order status page, my DSL connection went live today. (Thanks to my Nokia E61 for being able to reach the web sans a land-based line.) Unfortunately my equipment hasn’t yet arrived but I noticed my old Zyxel DSL modem (still powered on) showed an active DSL link. Hmm…

Since the Zyxel is already configured as a bridge I changed my Linksys PPPoE parameters and, voila!, it works. EarthLink was supposed to provide me with downstream speed of 3.0 or 6.0 Mbps rather than the typical 1.5 so I headed over to the Speakeasy broadband test to see what I had: 1.5 Mbps / 256 Kbps. I can live with that since it’s $25 less than what Covad was gouging charging me for the same. Maybe I’ll get more bandwidth with the Earthlink modem when it arrives - we’ll see.

Sickening as in “being under the weather.” Oh, I read the books and was prepared for the sleepness nights, poopy diapers, and spit-up. None of these were all that bad, especially if you spent a few hours with my wife’s former cat. Evil Dexter would swat at your feet in the middle of the night, barf on the carpet, and take a dump if he felt the vindictive urge.

But what I wasn’t prepared for is how many nasty viruses and bacterium that Junior brings home from day care. In days past I’d be sick a couple times a year - bad cold, sore throat. Now it’s every month, the most recent a two-day fever topping out at 103.2 and sore throat that feels like a cactus took up residence in my throat.

This is supposed to continue through pre-school…

When it comes to technology I like having a contingency plan. Why? Because when you need your computer, ISP, or printer in an emergency they don’t work. I’m too reliant on my Internet connection for everything, so when I bought a Nokia E61 smartphone I wanted to utilize its ability to act as a wireless modem when my DSL goes down or there isn’t a Starbucks in sight.

Scouring My-Symbian and All About Symbian I finally came across Ross Barkman’s home page chock-full of GSM modem scripts for the Mac. Of the many Nokia scripts to choose from, the one which worked for me had nothing to do with Nokia. It’s called “Generic 3G CID1″ and worked flawlessly.

Your mileage may vary, but this is my hardware and software configuration:

• T-Mobile with Unlimited Internet plan
• Nokia E61 Smartphone
• Mac PowerBook G4
• Belkin Bluetooth 2.0 USB adapter
• OS X 10.4.7
• PPP settings
• Account name: (blank)
• Password: (blank)
• Telephone number: internet2.voicestream.com
• PPP Advanced Options: (all unchecked)
• TCP/IP settings: (blank/defaults)
• Bluetooth modem settings: Modem: Generic 3G CID1 / Enable error correction: (unchecked) / Wait for dial-tone: (unchecked)

It’s possible these settings can be tweaked to work better or faster, but they work. You can forego all this and purchase Nova Media’s launch2net which works flawlessly but you can’t beat free.