Good morning everybody,
Here I am, awake on the other side of the big blue. I had another good night of sleep. Seems I needed. Our provider is still out. The messages I wrote yesterday are still stored...
I am about to go to work, and I'll be punished the whole week end. Friday and saturday are very "heavy" days for us. The yesterday sunset was gorgeous, thank you for the pics. It seems beautiful weather had gone. We has 15 days sunny days in a row, but today the clouds are back and maybe it could rain. Dan must be nearly to go to bed and Olaf and Jos should pop out in a minute... I wish you a nice day and catch you later.

Good Morning Martine. I hope it does not rain for you while at work. That and I hope it is not too heavy for you! Glad you got a good night's sleep! Here's coffee

Early morning pic

Just Beautiful!

Have a great Friday! The weekend is near!


Thank-you again for yesterday, feeling better today! See you in the evening!

Good .. afternoon already ..
Had some major probs at work, so I was kinda busy this morning .. but everything seems under control right now ..

Good morning Eileen and Olaf. I guess Martine is off to work by now. I haven't had any time to check in the past couple days, so I feel deprived. Hopefully today will let me take a peek from time to time. Looks like the lights are still on at the gate.

The light breeze is making some interesting ripple patterns on the water.

Reef cam is quiet. Everyone is keeping their distance.

Good morning Bluebeard. Come on in and chat.

Grendel and bouillabaise.

Up close and personal. Satchmo isn't shy this morning.

Good Morning all. Our day is just starting. Rained all night and still this morning. Great pics. Looks like another BEAUTIFUL morning on Bonaire. But when is it not?

Hi everybody. Nice capture of Satchmo John. I dug this one out of the archives. Annie B.

WOW! Just bumped into this one. Is anyone finding it slow going to get here today? Annie B.

GMTA, Nice day here in NC again...Just wanted to thank all that have expressed good wishes for my family reference my son's spinal surgery. He came through yesterday in flying colors and is doing just great....Possibly will be able to come home today... I will be there with my taxi and fetch him on home. He will have a long recovery period but should proceed better at home. Hospitals will make you sick...LOL.. Again, thanks everyone.. I will be leaving soon and will try to get back to see the beautiful sunsets... Have a nice day everyone....UB

Annie, I have never seen it this slow before, I have broadband and I also took Jake's advise and logged in to BT in hopes that it would make it faster but no luck... We are either a bit over our capacity like Jake said or the net is just really clogged...Maybe it is over loaded by soldiers in Iraq trying to contact their loved ones... If that is the case then I will just get off and let them have it.... UB

Well, finished grading my students' quizzes, so I get to take a few minutes to watch the cams again. Boat up there, now. Maybe divers in a bit?

A little gate action, of the exit kind. I'm in and out of here, so hope someone is keeping a steady eye out for divers.

Well, boat's leaving, and no divers that I saw. Another dud.

TopKick. Glad to hear that everything went well with you son. I wish him a speedy recovery. I have broadband too, but you could be right with your suggestion. Annie B.

I fond a diver.

Good work, Annie. Glad someone picked up on him/her.

Sailboat makes a nice shot.

mornin' all! topkick, glad your son's surgery went well, i must have missed your post about it...john and annie, my connection is slow too (from home)...hmmm...TGIF!

Signing in.

Another visitor. Candygram?

The slower BT access is because of bandwidth issues at our end. Will be that way for a bit, unfortunately - we're looking to increase our server bandwidth, but it's expensive because we have to do it in megabit increments (an extra Mbps of traffic is close to a grand per month.

The result is that our free sites (e.g. BT and a few others) are being rate controlled so that our paying client sites don't get bogged down.

We've currently got 128Kbps allocated to BonaireTalk. So those of you on cable modems will see a slow down, while dial-up users will likely not.

Once we see what the regular throughput from our servers stabilizes at we may find we have a little more wiggle room and may be able to increase the rate limit.

Note that my prior message about signing in to get higher bandwidth access pertained to the WebCams site, not BonaireTalk. There is no higher bandwidth option for BT at present (not entirely sure if we could even add one).

Jake

Jake--Is this also true of other Bonaire sites? I've been having trouble down-loading ExtraBon yesterday and today, but I thought it was here and not there.

This is a nice distant picture of Charlette.


Carmen

Annie B. - Mine is slow to this AM.

Could this be jellyfish or squid? I didn't know if it was jellyfish time. I couldn't remember when they came.

Holly,

Yes - it's true of ExtraBon too - that's a free site (we provide hosting of it as a free service to the local newspaper, Extra!).

Jake

This looks funny. Is it a little wave or something coming up out of the water again?



Carmen

Well Howdy everyone. I'm back in the pool for some quick chat. I've been way out of the loop for about a month now. It seems that all that nasty business in the news hasn't effected the chat. I'm very happy.

A special note to Annie: Claire and I have been thinking about you and Emma. One of Claire's friends from grade school is now fighting the fight.

It looks like a wonderful afternoon

Hiya Kevin. I was wondering where you got to, and have often thought about you and Claire. That is awful news. I bet Claire is upset. Annie B.

Here's one I caught earlier.

Just dropped in and found this group.

Hi Annie,

Yes, she's upset, but she's being strong for her friend.

HEY ! PARTY AT JAKE"S HOUSE

Preaching to the choir.



Or maybe they organized a march for more BT bandwidth.

Hi Everyone! Finally got a chance to pop in . I was hoping it would not be as slow today. Took a long time to get on. Hope the bandwidth can be increased it will keep a lot of people off.

I finally managed to get a few minutes during lunch to pop in and say, "HI!"
Nothing on the cams right now, so I'm saying, "BYE!"

Ida,

Unless we find a sugar daddy willing to drop a chunk of money on BT as a sponsor or for advertising (or a bunch of small supporters), there's no spare money in the kitty to pay for extra bandwidth on BT (since it's free service). As such, don't expect significant jump in bandwidth anytime soon. Just wishing it will happen is a nice thought, but unlikely to result in much actual advancement.

Sorry.

Jake

Jake, no worries...loading is worth the wait...but i guess we could start making the threads shorter so they are easier to load Remember folks, it costs money to run an internet business...bandwidth is like renting the building...building gets crowded, costs money to rent a bigger space

jake, does your provider "ding" you for overuse of bandwidth? i know we had huge "penalty" costs for going over our allotment, so we had to buy more although for us, that was a good thing

oops, forgot my sunset pic

One reason we have the current bandwidth trauma is that we went way over our allotment in January and February and the first half of March without realizing it, and yes, they dinged us big time (way too late to fix it sooner, mind you). Major ouch. So we're doing what we can to avoid being dinged again.

You're absolutely right about shorter threads, by the way. They would help enormously.

Jake

Some divers missed...

OOps...didn't mean to be rude by not saying Good day to all! Been too busy to peek in much but found another couple of fish in the archives...
a tail..
and an almost clear picture of Slim..

Lots of visitors missed...where did everyone go?

Hmmm, maybe we're starting the short thread thing (Jake, is 50 a good cutoff for string length?) or more likely, everyone is off to a nice weekend (hope!) Gotta go, myself...see you all!

jake, ouch! we were charged THOUSANDS of dollars in penalties! it is like they triple charge for going over your limit...ok folks, let's move to a new thread for the sunsets

Okay, Bluetang...here's one last fish for this one..