Missing Person

Don't alert the police, don't call in the search squad - I'm still alive!

There are too few hours in each 24-hour day. I notices this in the first years of university when I postponed going to sleep after spending hours and hours behind the computer, but lately it's plain ridiculous!  On most days, I get about 2-3 hours for everything that I want to do. That's the amount of hours each day that I'm awake but both kids are asleep. It sound like a lot of hours, considering that it only takes 10-15 minutes to take a shower and the dishwasher makes it much faster to do the dishes and I can watch something on TV while I chop onions or stir the pot. Also, who needs books anyway and internet news isn't really worth too much time. Most movies could be watched in a day and if I'm lucky, I might even be able to watch most of a movie without interruptions. Very lucky. And with supreme timing! For a while I was really hooked on the TV-series "Grey's Anatomy". I watched 7 seasons of it - mostly while I fed the baby but also during those 2-3 hours. Now I ran out of it and got around to fixing the emoticon problem in the blog. Or at least part of it. I'll eventually fix the older posts as well. 

But really, writing a blog post without the emoticons just takes the fun right out of the entire thing. Without the use of emoticons I can only insert a small part of the dramatic effect that I'd like to add. I get a bit emoticon-crazy sometimes. There have been moments when I'm having a real live conversation with someone and I want to use an emoticon to better illustrate my views. You guys sometimes get that feeling too, right? Right?!

.....

Emoticons stopped working.  (this one is uploaded in blogger)

.....

Damn! It should not be that difficult to put a few moving pictures in a blog. My emoticon collection is nearly 500 files but it's LESS THAN 5MB!!! Most free hosting services offer 100 MB so I could just use any one of those, but I already tried that and that's why I started having problems in the first place. I'm quite convinced that if I just get another free web hosting service, I'll end up having the same problem in a couple of years. If I don't owe them anything, they don't owe me anything and the entire thing is very unstable. Except if I find a company that has a reputation to uphold. Then I might get lucky and get a few free mega bites of space that will be reliable for years with very little downtime. I thought I found that with hosting.eu.pn but now it is sometimes working and sometimes not and it shouldn't be having this problem.

Now I have a few options. 

1) I could contact hosting.eu.pn 24/7 customer support. Uhm... No way! Let it be a lesson to IT-companies. Some people would rather look for an alternative to get in contact with actual customer support. I can't be bothered to start troubleshooting the visibility of a gif image. It's a simple situation. I've uploaded a gif image and blogger sometimes can't open it. Perhaps the hosting service sucks. I want an alternative!

2) I could find another free random hosting service. Not reliable enough.

3) I could use Google Sites. As far as I saw, they don't even have FTP-uploading option! It's not free hosting. It's some ridiculous dumb-user website builder. I couldn't even upload my own HTML file!

4) I could upload all the emoticons to blogger one by one. All 500 of them. One. By. One. And then I could insert them with the "Insert image" function. I'm not some elitist code-writing web programmer but I do  prefer to use a little HTML code if it makes my life easier. And honestly, it really wouldn't be easy to insert each emoticon and then remove the code that makes it stay in it's own center-aligned paragraph.

5) I could upload them using Picasa Web Albums, since it would be easier to upload images. Lets test it...

(uploaded with Picasa and using HTML code to insert it.)

Now the ultimate test: if I upload the images in one catalogue, will the image URL stay predictable? I need only the file name to change and the rest of the address to be the same for all the emoticons. So if I copy the image link and change the file name in the code, I should be able to see other emoticons as well...
(fail!)

Nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe I should just contact hosting.eu.pn customer support. I mean - how bad could it be?

(imagination goes wild) "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

NOOOOOoooooooo!!!!!!