1/18/15 Talk about spam! The Steam Powered website is isn't on Facebook, or Blogspot, or Garage Band, or Reverb Nation, or any of the hundreds of other "free" hosting services because I don't want my pages full of ads, flash graphics and other crap that detracts from a good browse. It's pretty easy to avoid this stuff if you care and if you can read. The web happens to be full of websites that are NOT on "free" hosts, and it's easy to connect with people who know how to do things and who are willing to share what they know with you. And it's pretty cheap as well. I'm paying less than $10 a month for more space and bandwidth than I will ever need, and that's with a website that is fairly graphics intensive and hosts hundreds of songs and some video. Anyway, I thought I had more space than I would ever need, but things have been filling up lately. Last week I was notified by my host that I had exceeded the number of inodes and would need to reduce this or be barred from posting. Inodes? For the first time I scrolled down to the bottom of my "usage" page on my website host, and there it was- a graph showing my inodes. Of the 150,000 I was allowed, I was using 225,000. Somewhat over the limit there... nice of them not to just throw me out and lock the doors. So I had to actually read about inodes to find out what they are. What they are is links that the server stores to the files on a website. Now I know I have used a lot of graphics in the past, and I retain all of my old pages and the graphics that go with them, because nothing makes me sadder than trying to follow broken links, but there had been nothing close to a quarter of a million pictures, pages, and songs on my website over the past 14 years. I scoured through my online files, pulling out all the stuff I had stored there "temporarily" or that wasn't serving any usefull purpose (ogg files?), and while I did cut my storage space usage by 2/3 (!) my inodes useage hadn't appeared to drop. Filed another help ticket. They said it could be caused by the mail in my mailbox. I hadn't thought of that, mainly because I have never used the optional mail service that comes with my account. I wasn't even sure how to access it, but I created a password and logged into the default address. There were 225,000 messages in my inbox. This was for an address that didn't officially exist! I had never used it for anything, but by default any email sent to any address ending with "somewhereoutwest.com" that couldn't be properly delivered was saved. It was so much mail that I couldn't even delete it. I had to get the guys at the hosting service to do it. Now I'm down to about 4,000 inodes used. I learned that there is a setting that will automatically reject any email that isn't directed to an actual address. It should probably be the default setting, and maybe it is- I might have enabled it in my ignorance at some time in the past. Anyway, lesson learned. That's a lot of spam!

1/17/15 After the big push to get Send Me the Bill out the door, things are getting back to normal. I had young Joe K in here (not his real name) recording a very cool version of an old Doors song. Have a listen- Moonlight Drive