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                            And this is a light page
                                        
Last May I took a trip to North Florida [1] to visit a friend of mine over
the weekend, and I took a Pocket PC (Personal Computer) with me to make
entries during the drive. 

Well, I just got a call from Smirk, who provided said Pocket PC. He just got
the bill for said Pocket PC. The Monopolistic Cell Phone Company is claiming
4MB (Megabyte) were transferred and therefore $100 is owed for data
transfered. Smirk called me to ask if I actually used that much data. 

I said that sounded high and I couldn't think of what I might have browsed
that caused 4MB of data to be transferred, and that I pretty much just used
the device to post the few entries during the drive up there and that at
worst, it could have only been maybe 300K (Kilobyte) or so of data transfer.
Smirk asked if I could generate a decent approximation and I said I would and
get back with him. 

I thought of maybe doing a test entry as if I were doing it from the Pocket
PC but having the firewall keep track of the data trnansfers, then multiply
that amount by the number of entries I actually posed through the thing when
I realized that I still have the log files from May. 

So I pulled all the requests made to my website via the Pocket PC and added
all the data transfered. 

Oh my. 

The result was a rather sobering 2,586,760 bytes transferred via 161
requests. 

Ouch. 

And here I thought my site was rather light, what with using CSS (Cascading
Style Sheet) for layout and the mostly text based nature of the site. 

So I guess it's conceivable that I could have used 4MB of transfer in a few
days. 

Ouch. 

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2006/05/26-28

Email author at sean@conman.org

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