A WHOLE NEW DAY ALL OVER OVER AGAIN

So we spent the last week on vaycay, and drove home yesterday.  I'm 
preparing an Extra Special Episode of "Palaver" on all that, but it's 
going to take time, as I have over a gigabyte of audio to plow through 
(most of it's crap, so I'll be panning for gold), as well as some video 
and still photos.  Not sure if I should put the video and photos into 
the RSS feed, or just mention them on the show, and people who are 
interested can go look for them.  On the one hand, people who are 
looking for audio-only would be pissed to have different files show up; 
on the other hand, the visual stuff will also be a part of the episode, 
so if a listener signed up to get the show, they ought to get the 
friggin' show.  I'll probably tar.gz the different materials together on 
the gophersite so that people who prefer direct downloads (like me) can 
grab it all in one go, but I'll have them there separately too, 'cause 
I'm a thoughtful soul.

And speaking of downloading from a gophersite, over the course of the 
week, I was on my wife's machine, and I ended up at:

gopher://mirror.lug.udel.edu/1

Now, if you haven't been there, you'll find it to be a kinda-sorta 
gopherized version of Distrowatch.org, acting as a mirror for a large 
number of Linux distros, and other FOSS projects.  And it's updated 
regularly with all the newest stuff.  Very cool, right?  Well, it WOULD 
be, if the damn thing worked.  I hadn't been on a system so slow and 
crummy since we left home to go on vacation (my net connection at home 
being woeful).  I tried several times, but it kept stuttering and timing 
out and freezing up.  I'll bet they allocated half a MB of memory or 
something for the gopher server.  Hello?!  When you have a rich load of 
content, lots of people are going to want to use it!  Sure gopher 
machines can get by with less RAM than their http equivalents (or so the 
legend goes), but you STILL have to allocate enough to cover your 
expected traffic.

I mean, I'm no starry-eyed gopherite here: I know that the "gophernet" 
is bleak at best, with a truly huge number of dead, undeveloped, and 
outdated links.  It's for this reason that it pisses me off to no end 
when people who ought to know better treat it like the red-headed 
step-child of networked computing.  It would be the PERFECT delivery 
system for these larger files, if it was only given the resources it 
requires.  Oh, I'm sure their system works great for serving up text, 
but I wasn't there for text.  No one will be going there for text.  If 
your gopher server is going to be serving up big files, then, for cryin' 
out loud, give it the RAM and TLC it needs.  Even gopher can't make 
resources appear out of thin air.

Piss me off...
.