BeigeJournal

This site has been hosted by ICDSoft for nearly one year now, and I renewed my contract without hesitation. The current price for a third of a gigabyte of disk and five gigabytes a month of traffic is $60 per year, though as a current customer I was offered another year for only $40. They also now offer one GB of disk and 15 GB/month of bandwidth for $120/year. The service works. There may well have been a time during the year when the site was down, but I wasn’t aware of it. They run mail servers that will accept incoming mail and relay outgoing mail, which work fine. The web-based control panel is reasonably easy to use. The servers run Linux. They’ve never tried to sell me anything I didn’t ask for, they’ve never bothered me at all, they just keep the server running and leave me alone, which is just what I want.

The service isn’t perfect. You do not get the ability to SSH in to the server, and you get the Apache access logs but not error logs. These omissions make debugging the blog software setup more difficult, but I’ve managed. This is, after all, the low-cost end of web hosting.

Overall, I’ve been very satisfied with the service. If you want cheap, no hassle, web hosting for a smallish site and can live without SSH access (or error logs), ICDSoft seems like a good choice.

For my latest installment in the “I tried it so you don’t have to” beverage reviews, I bought a bottle of Acqua Panna water, bottled, according to the label, at Panna Springs, Scarperia (Florence), Italy, by Sanpellegrino S.p.A. of Milan, Italy. Using a small tape measure and a globe I measured the great-circle distance between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Florence, Italy at roughly 7,500 kilometers. Milwaukee is located on the shore of Lake Michigan, a lake with a surface area greater than the area of Belgium, so importing water from 7,500km away is just plain silly. Normally, I get water from the city water system, which is supplied by the Big Lake that is approximately 10km from my home. The cost to me of this water is near zero. In contrast, one-half of a liter of Fancy Italian Water cost me $1.39 plus tax at the Outpost Co-op. In spite of the price, and the unnecessary environmental degradation caused in shipping water from Italy, I bought a bottle, because I knew that I could get a blog entry out of it. Indeed, a long one, in accordance with what I’ve taken to calling Dan’s Law: The more mundane and simple the product, the longer the review you can write about it.

Acqua Panna “Acqua Oliominerale,” “From the Hills of Tuscany,” comes in a clear glass 500 mL bottle with attractive labels. The bottle is sealed with an old-style, non-resealable bottle cap. I rarely encounter these, but I do have a number of bottle cap tools around the kitchen, on the “back end” of tools normally used the other way ‘round. The water is uncarbonated and uncolored.

It tastes like…water. I carefully compared it to the City of Milwaukee water that I keep in a plastic dispenser in the refrigerator, and, honestly, I can’t tell the difference. I really can’t. I poured some of each into identical glasses, left them on the counter for a while until I forget which was which, and I couldn’t tell them apart. There might be a very slight difference in flavor, but I’m not sure, and I certainly couldn’t say which would be better.

So there you have it. I tried it, so you don’t have to. Don’t bother with Italian bottled water, just move to Milwaukee and drink the tap water here. If your tap water is awful, like, for example, the stuff in Green Valley, Arizona, where my mom lives, and for some reason you don’t want to move to Milwaukee, a nice city with a fine public library, a surprising number of filkers, and a tendency toward snow in the winter, then buy something cheaper.