Today is an exciting day at the office as we launch the new interior theming for the Twin Cities Daily Planet.   Bigger pictures, less clutter, lots of colorbox image popups - and real soon now, slideshows.  This has been in the works for a while now, and puts the site in a much better position for an upgrade to Drupal 7.  The new theme is a good deal less quirky, and let us incorporate a lot of new features, including using Display Suite for more flexibility in managing the look of the site.

In our never-ending attempt to support blogging infrastructure in Wisconsin (and the country) we welcome Waukesha Wonk to the sites we are hosting.  Lisa over at Waukesha Wonk has been blogging for some time at multiple web sites, and we're pleased as punch to be hosting her Wordperss blog here at Cruiskeen Consulting.  Go pay the blog a visit!

We have for some time been providing CrashPlan PROe Backups as a service.  CrashPlan is a spectacularly good backup product for many users, and some changes in their licensing scheme will allow us to provide backup services at a lower price.  Our new pricing gives you up to 40 Gbytes of storage and will let you back up up to 4 different computers on your account.

We would like to welcome progressive Wisconsin blog Blogging Blue to our web hosting. Zach and group over at Blogging Blue are now hosted at Cruiskeen Consulting and will be bringing you political news every day.

I'm astounded and saddened by the incredibly quick demise of Eastman Kodak and the use of actual film.  Kodak is still hanging in there, but as a shadow of its former self.  I'm someone who used a lot of Kodak product over the years (and our back bedroom still oddly holds some now-ancient bottles of Kodak chemicals).  I use digital cameras almost every day, yet I still ache for holding my procession of film cameras and using them. Life is completely different, and only an improvement in some ways. I still occasionally haul out my set of Olympus equipment and take some pictures just for the joy of it.

This was all brought to mind today by an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the fall of Kodak. Kodak was a ubiquitous part of the American landscape. Sure, we were all tempted by Polaroid (now also a ghostly shadow) and the Japanese films.  For many years I was a devotee of Agfa film - one of the first of the manufacturers to fall. When Paul Simon wrote "don't take my Kodachrome away" I think he did not really think of it as a possibility - and it's now long gone. I miss the equipment, the joy of craft, the hours in the darkroom, and the magic of the process. Just an old man missing the past, but what a past it was.