My bandwidth woes appear to be no more. Those plucky Dutch have come to the rescue — in particular, Elise Roders and her generous colleagues at SURFnet. My videos have been uploaded onto their Nether-servers, and if you go to my download page right now, that’s where you’ll be downloading from.
They’re taking on the burden of what was, at one point, a fairly substantial amount of traffic. It’s been a while since the videos have been available though, and I’m not sure the demand is all that high anymore. In any case, please be considerate and don’t bombard them with downloads. Pick a size and format that works for you, watch, save to your hard drive if you like, then go away. I know it’s tempting to start a collection of the video in all its available compression rates and codecs, but resist the urge. I need you to be strong.
A hearty thanks to all the other tips and offers. I was presented with dozens upon dozens and I’m sure there were plenty of other good ones.
A lot of people suggested I use bit torrent to distribute the video in peer-to-peer fashion. It’s a fine idea, and if anyone would like to take on the task of explaining what "bit torrent" is 50 times a day on email, let me know.
In the meantime, I’m happy to provide the established no-fuss formats.
With school starting up soon, a lot of teachers are wanting to download the video and show it to their classes. This, of course, leads to a lot of requests about taking the word "Hell" out of my site name and the video credits.
Part of me wants to oblige. But another part of me — one with bigger muscles and intimidating facial hair — wants to point out that it’s just a stupid gosh dang word and it never hurt anybody. I know, parents are parents and they don’t want their childrens’ minds poisoned by menacing figures of speech. But as much as I’d like to insert some fun into geography class, I’d also like to insert the idea that students don’t need to be quite so shielded from the commonplace.
Speaking of the whole school thing, I’m getting a lot of invites to speak to students in person about travel and all that. It’s not something I’ve ever done before, but it sounds like fun. If the logistics are feasible, I’m up for it.
I hope no one’s expecting me to keep updating this journal at the pace I was at during the trip. My life consists mostly of loafing around these days. You’re really not missing much. If it starts getting interesting again, I’ll let you know.
Someone sent me this today. That’s all I got.