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.

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?

My left arm hurts like hell, the result of a tetanus shot I had to have today in order to continue with school. Seems UNCG shredded my last set of immunization records ten years after I graduated (they keep them forever now, for all the good that does me) so I had to reach back into my childhood (and my mom’s files) to piece together what I could. I would’ve needed the tetanus booster anyway, but it’s still annoying.

That said, I’m in a better frame of mind than I was three days ago. I was just a little overwhelmed that I had so much going on all of a sudden. I knew it was temporary, but that didn’t help much. When much of your income is derived working for TV stations, September is a rather hectic time to be starting anything labor-intensive. And underneath it all, I suspect I was really freaked out at the looming due date of my first paper as a graduate student.

As is the case with so many other scary processes, I really just needed to dive in and get started on the damned thing, which I finally did today once most of my paid workload had calmed down a bit. I found a good chunk of supporting research (damn, there’s a lot of information available online when you have access to a major university library), made up my outline, and finally realized late this afternoon that I would probably get through this paper with no problem and might even do a passably good job on it.

The topic, for the masochists among you, is the effect of commercial search engine technologies on the value of the information acquired through them, and related implications for information professionals. Do I know how to have a fun weekend or what?

I know I’ve said this before, but my apologies to everyone I’ve completely ignored for the past ten days or so. You can’t imagine how overextended I’ve been between the fact that this is the busiest time of year for pretty much all my web clients and the fact that my first two weeks back in school proved a bit more hectic than I’d envisioned. Throw in one major family gathering, one part-time job, and several assorted minor crises, and you have me, as of today.

It’ll be better in about two weeks.

If you’re starved for content, though, you can watch me being mentioned on the local morning news.

Ten years ago this week, I was getting ready to leave on the Planet SOMA US Tour of 1997. It was a pretty major event for me: a five-week cross-country (and back) road trip where I’d be staying in assorted motels, and sometimes with complete strangers who invited me into their homes on the basis of having enjoyed my website. I updated almost daily from the road (which was rather unusual in those early internet days) and had a really great time all the way around.

For the next five weeks, I’ll be saluting and remembering that trip, and you can follow along day by day if you like, using the nifty “Otherstream Retro” box you’ll see at the top of the front page. Or you can cheat and read the whole story. Or neither one. Your choice. Either way, enjoy it. I did.