Tonight I’ve got another update to my Ormsby House Photo Gallery. The July update not only is a little bit late, but it’s also pretty weak and thin. It’s the first update in nearly two months, but that’s because not a whole lot has been going on over at the old Ormsby. They’ve got to be having some major issues that are making work progress so slowly. Sure, it’s a major project, but I’ve seen them build casinos from the ground up in less than the three years that the Ormsby House has been closed. On the other side of town, an old hardware store was transformed into a casino in under a month. So I know it can be done. The Ormsby House just seems to be cursed.

Of course, I’d rather have them do it right than do it fast. I haven’t been in the new Casino Fandango that they built out of the old Supply One store, but it looks pretty chintzy from the outside. It still looks like a hardware store, to be honest. So, if they need to take five years to turn the Ormsby House into a five star wonder, then I say go for it. I just hope they finish it before we move up to Washington.

The new version of AOL Communicator came out this week. We’ve been using the preview version of AOL Communicator here on the home computer so Viola can check her AOL mail in the same place we check our POP mail. I also like the way it creates a separate folder for each POP account, which Outlook Express definitely does not do. Mozilla Mail might do that too, since AOL supposedly stole most of the code from that project. But I haven’t played with the Moz mail client because I figure it doesn’t have the AOL account access built in to it. Plus we’re still using Outlook Express, and I think two e-mail clients is plenty for one computer.

So anyway, the new, “final”, version offers quite a few improvements over the preview. For one, you can finally import mail messages from Outlook Express. It wouldn’t let you do that before. Another thing it lets you do is back up all your messages to a .zip file. I’ll have to play around with that one and see what kind of files it puts in that zip.

But the biggest addition, and this isn’t even e-mail related, is the Radio@AOL button they added to the bottom. Now that Internet radio stations are shutting down one after the other because of the CARP decision, AOL Radio was the one place I knew I could turn to for dozens of channels of online radio. But listening to it used to mean opening up the AOL client, signing in, putting up with the Welcome Screen nonsense, and clicking through to the Radio screen. Now, I just hit a little button at the bottom of the Communicator mail client, and a stand-alone Radio@AOL window pops up. So nice. Today I’m jumping between TV Tunes and 1-Hit Wonders. Playing right now? The Growing Pains theme.

Hey, I’m paying for AOL mostly so my mother-in-law can get online. I might as well find ways to benefit from it myself.

My adventures in Linux continue. This week I downloaded the ISOs for Mandrake Linux 9.1. Yesterday I tried to install it, but the CD I burned was bad or something, and I got nothing but errors. I burned a second disc, and that one took this morning, so now I’ve got a running Mandrake/KDE workstation. I’ll have a lot more to say about Mandrake as I go on using it, but I wanted to cheer myself on about one thing. I loaded my site up in Konqueror, for the first time ever, and it showed up perfectly. Woo hoo! Rah-rah for web standards!