Biting the bullet...

For the longest time, I'd entertained the idea of hiring a bookkeeper part time, believing that the money spent on the bookkeeper would be less than the money lost in other ways: late fees, body blows to the credit rating, and so on.

Today was Angela's first day.

Talking about money problems, it would appear that Fotolog.net, which I mentioned a few days ago, is really up against it.

However, right now costs still outweigh the money coming in. It is very expensive to run a site that serves over half a billion page views per month! We have to rent over 70 servers and pay for over 22 terabytes of bandwidth each month.

What with my ISPs granting me upwards of 5 or 10 GB of bandwidth per month, I cannot even conceive of 22 terabytes of data flow. Ye gods.

Fotolog is just under $70K in the hole, which could be made up easily if everyone who's an active member coughed up half a simolean.

Good luck to them, I've become a Gold Camera member, if only for a month.

Cheers...

Saving grace...

I don't know how or why, but we had apparently misplaced the Windows 2000 Administrator's password for the FedEx machine at the store. As a result, I was unable to fix a problem that was slowly making the machine unusable, until finally an attempt to upgrade the FedEx shipping software failed owing to a "low memory" condition and the unit would do little more than boot up.

Fortunately, there are resources out there that can help. I'd read about the existence of a solution that involved a Linux boot disk and a disk of optional drivers for the Windows file system, and earlier this week, I tracked it down at Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, Bootdisk / CD.

Fortunately, I just need a plain-vanilla password reset, which the software accomplished in short order. I've archived the disk and the instructions in case I ever need it again.

The low memory condition was apparently caused by the existence of something like 50 programs of uncertain parentage (though some had names like "BargainSearch" -- which is not necessarily a real name, it just sounds like a program I found). I deleted the lot from the Temp directory and from the registry (figuring I had little to lose, as we had already moved FedEx to another machine at the store), and rebooted.

No problems so far!

Cheers...