Menu Close

2007

DNS the MNS

The September curse has returned. I don’t think I’ve typed the word correctly even once today. Or this month.

Thing that annoys me today: DNS propagation. You’d think it would be more of a science and less of a crap shoot by this point in internet history, but no. I transferred a domain for a client yesterday afternoon. By this morning, it was resolving to the correct IP address for me, but not for the client. Now, it’s reverted to the old IP address even for me.

When I check with the host and do various “whois” searches, everything seems OK, so I assume the current problem is with some Time Warner DNS server somewhere. That wouldn’t be a surprise, since (based on their speed) I think most of Time Warner’s DNS servers are running on IBM 286 machines connected to the internet via 2400-baud modems anyway.

Should I be worried that I’m spending my Saturday night bitching about DNS servers?

Mod Con

Luxury home or cellblock? You be the judge…

I’m as much a modernist as the next guy (and probably more of one), but what passes for modernism today is often more about shock value than any sort of architectural principle. It’s no less contrived than a Victorian with lots of gingerbread; only the building materials are different.

Just Another Frantic Friday

Observation du jour, after a mildly unpleasant Friday: why do so many ad agencies and design firms (disctinctions blur these days) have such a nagging tendency to find the absolute most complicated manner possible of completing any given task? I suppose it’s an easy way to maximize billable hours, which is probably why they also get so bloody territorial about it when you call them on it.

No, I’m not going to be any more specific, because I plan to take a lot of business away from this particular firm as a result of my class, grace under pressure, and old-fashioned customer service skills. Not to mention my humility.

It’s 9:00. May I have my weekend now, please?

Critical Mess

I knew there was still intelligent life in San Francisco, but it’s rare that you see evidence of it in the Chronicle:

Tim Holt “Critical Mass turns 15” (Sept. 14) compares the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement with that of Critical Mass. Hard to see what people risking their lives fighting for voting rights have in common with elitists on $3,000 bikes who deliberately disrupt traffic to make it hard for working people to get home. In his attempt to elevate this juvenile obstructionism, Holt trivializes a great historical movement.

The above is a letter to the editor in response to this nonsense by guest columnist Tim Holt about how an anarchist slugfest that has antagonized motorists, pedestrians, transit users, and damned near everyone else in San Francisco every month for fifteen years has been an overwhelmingly “affirming” process. To paraphrase another letter writer, the mind boggles at the thought of how many great things cyclisyts might have accomplished without the PR debacle that is Critical Mass.

Fairs and Houses

Another reason I miss Los Angeles more than San Francisco: you rarely saw houses driving down the freeway in San Francisco. I’m not sure if that’s because there were so few freeways in SF to begin with, or because people who could afford houses in SF rarely ever took them out for a Sunday drive. Afraid of scratches and dings, y’know?

I am partcularly glad this week that I no longer live adjacent to Folsom Street. I’m also glad it’s almost time for a fair I actually want to go to, as opposed to one that I usually left town to avoid. Lest you argue that this fact makes me seem old, boring, or “sex-negative”, I assure you that I still like sex very much. But the Folsom Street Fair wasn’t really about sex for me. It was usually more about pawing my way through 100,000 annoying, smelly, drunk people (most of whom had very little reason to be exposing so much naked flesh) as I tried to make my way home to watch “The Simpsons”.

Plus, the hot dogs are better at the Dixie Classic.

Stuff

No more 1997 road trip stuff at the top of the page. I’ll miss that. Maybe on the twentieth anniversary, I’ll actually post some of the video.

Sadly, I don’t really have anything exciting to add in my first new post in two weeks or so. Life has pretty much been about school, work, and more of both for the past few weeks. We did make it to the fair on Wednesday and to the Jewish Festival in Greensboro with my mom on Sunday. And we successfully avoided the North Carolina Identity Politics Gathering, after accidentally wandering a little too close to the South Carolina version in Columbia the week before.

This weekend, though, I have no schoolwork due, three consecutive days off work, and plans to go someplace relatively far away. Therefore, I will not be answeting the phone or checking email after Thursday night, lest these plans somehow be ruined, as so many others have recently. OK, maybe I won’t go that far, but I really do need to get away for a couple of days.

For your perusal: new photos in the Carolinas photo gallery, including shots of Columbia, Durham, Lexington, Burlington, and Kannapolis.

Victim Mentality

Yet another example of the emerging propensity among “conservatives” toward the very same whining oversensitivity they used to deride so instinctively in liberals. Like so many annoying granola leftists, these right wing nimrods seem to be spending way too much time desperately searching for something to be offended by.

Of course, it helps your case if you can portray yourself as the underdog, even when your ideology is pretty much in control of the country at the present time, right? Fundamentalist Christians have been doing it for years. From some of their rhetoric, you’d think Christians were such a persecuted minority that they were in danger of becoming exctinct, when in fact they constitute a vast (and controlling) majority of the American population.

Perpetual Victim Syndrome is problematic enough when it develops in people who have actually faced some adversity. Can we please skip all these tears for the vast “persecuted” conservative majority?