Dial-Up Hell

Here's Mandy, caught cracking up during our most recent shoot. I love the "whole body" expression it captures, and in some ways captures the whole mood of the shoot. This one is pretty modest by the standards of the rest of that shoot and our previous shoot, nevertheless, this image was taken down from one online community she posts to. Specific reasons are rarely given when these things happen... is the "peekaboo" flash the problem? Or, since it is an art nude forum, maybe she isn't nude enough?

Due to a phone company SNAFU, I've been in "dial-up hell" for the past few days, and will probably have to endure it for a few more. Even though it's a DSL connection, it's only functioning at about 50kb speed, slower than a lot of dial-up connections. I'd heard somewhere recently that about half of internet users have high-speed connections, which would indicate the other half still endure dial-up. But I suspect this is misleading relative to the amount of internet activity that takes place over high-speed connections. I'm guessing the 80/20 rule applies... 80% of the surfing is done by 20% of internet users, and I'd guess that 20% is made up almost exclusively of people with high-speed connections. I'm sure there's a study on this somewhere that I could Google, but my connection is so slow, I can't take the time to find out right now.

I bring it up here because like most photo blogs, this one takes a bit of time to download through a dial-up connection, and I'd be curious to know what percentage of my visitors are using dial-up versus high-speed connections. And, to those of you who use dial-up, I have a renewed appreciation for what you put up with to view a page like this one... thank you for your patience. :) I'm beginning to think that website designers should force themselves to spend a week out of the year using only dial-up. Might change the face of eBay, Amazon and MySpace, if nothing else. It used to be that load speed was a primary concern in web design, and I remember worrying about squeezing a 24k graphic down to 16k -- because that's a 33% savings in load time. I'm guessing today that online retailers and marketers don't care about that any longer, because if a visitor can't afford a high-speed connection, they probably aren't the type of big spender the retailer is looking for.

But if nothing else, the slow connection has made me more deliberate in what sites I visit and how often I check my e-mail. And that's probably a good thing.