Klarinet Archive - Posting 000601.txt from 1997/11

From: Mark Charette <charette@-----.com>
Subj: The status of www.sneezy.org
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 1997 23:20:11 -0500

As many of you have noticed, I've changed the name of the computer
known as sneezy from sneezy.mika.com to www.sneezy.org . This was
done for a few reasons, a couple of which I enumerated recently.
Decoupling it from my company's name was a good choice, I think,
and sneezy is no longer sitting on my desk; my workstation has
changed to a different machine and sneezy now serves just for
clarinet and music purposes.

I've been agonizing over how to make sneezy a little less of a drain
on our corporation. The computer and disks that sneezy uses are
"excess" - fully depreciated and now owned (personally) by me.
The only expense that sneezy incurs the corporation are line costs,
and the line is shared by a few other machines in our office.

But ... the line costs us $1400 USD/month total. Sneezy takes up
about 1/3 of the productive activity on the line. My company has
always donated the bandwidth, but we've decided that we'd like to
try and recoup a bit of the cost of the line. Sneezy's going to
always remain free (if I ever had to charge for anything I'd give
it all away) but I'd like to see if there'd be any support for
"sponsors", both individual and corporate. An individual sponsor
would get their name on the Sponsor's page for a year and a small
token (an attractive iron-on "I support Sneezy" patch :), and
corporate would get their logo and link to their site (if they
have one) or their own Web page(s) on the computer. There's
possibly more to it; I'm open to ideas.

All the services on sneezy that currently exist (including the
Retail section as it exists) will continue to exist, the site is
always growing, and the line isn't going away. This is just to help
defray the costs that sneezy already incurs, and if possible
to help purchase software to make music more accessible (I looked
at the price of MIDISCAN - I can't afford to spend that much on
software, but it'd sure be a lot easier to produce free
out-of-copyright music if I had a copy of it).

Sneezy is always open as a host to non-profit organizations
(we get a tax writeoff for non-profits) and to people who want to
start a set of pages on a particular topic not covered in depth by
either the Clarinet Pages or Stan Geidel's Online Clarinet Resource.

If you're at all interested, please drop me a line at music@-----.com

Cheers,
--
Mark Charette | "This is a very democratic organization, so let's
charette@-----. All those who disagree with me, raise
Mika Systems, Inc.| their hands." - Eugene Ormandy
Webmaster of http://www.sneezy.org/clarinet, The Clarinet Pages