March 2009

My only complaint about the past twenty-four hours is the fact that we had to spend about eight of those hours without power, making the house a trifle chilly first thing this morning. But kudos to Duke Power for being fast on the repairs.

Sadly enough, this is the first decent snowfall we’ve seen since moving east almost four years ago. And at five inches, this really wasn’t all that major, despite all the media hype. I seem to remember a storm like this at least once a year when I was a kid, but to hear people discussing it on the news, you’d think it was the biggest snowstorm ever to hit North Carolina.

It’s one of those peculiarly southern things: a week-old pile of snow in a shopping center parking lot with a sign in the background showing the temperature to be a fairly steamy eighty degrees.

In other news:

• Richard Florida is still an ass.
• Yer humble host has landed himself a very nice internship starting in May. If it’s a named internship, it looks better on a résumé, right?
• Yes, I probably am way too old to be getting all excited about internships, but still…
• Apparently, we live in one of the only houses in America that has increased over six percent in value since 2006, or at least so sayeth the tax assessor. And I thought it was a buyers’ market.

Anyway, since I promised you Winston-Salem in the title and really only delivered in the first paragraph, here’s an otherwise unrelated photo of what used to be our train station, surrounded by lots of dead kudzu:

So here’s a question for all you networking types.

For the second time in two months or so, I am no longer able to access one of my client sites via HTTP. The connection to their webserver constantly times out. I can access it via FTP, and I’m not having trouble accessing any other sites. Plus, no one else seems to be having trouble accessing the site at all. The problem is not specific to my computer, but it does seem to be specific to my home network. I can access the site on my laptop from other places.

A traceroute shows that all traffic stops at one specific point (the IP address is 10.254.0.6, in case you care, which is apparently an IP address that isn’t supposed to show up in traceroutes). That was the case two months ago as well, but it was a different IP address that time (and not a weird one like this time). As a side note, there have been other odd problems with the company that hosts the site.

The first time it happened, about two months ago, it just seemed to rectify itself after about five or six days.

My questions are thus:

1. Why am I the only one having trouble accessing this site?
2. Why can I access it via FTP but not via HTTP, both of which involve the same IP address?
3. Why has it now happened to me twice?

Note: I’m not listing the site in question because I don’t want to broadcast it here, and because it’s irrelevant to most of you (because like everyone else, you’ll have no trouble accessing it). But if any superheroes need it, I’ll send documentation including traceroutes.

Driving into San Francisco on the Bay Bridge is a beautiful thing, but entering Pittsburgh through the Fort Pitt Tunnel — where you shoot out of the tunnel and find yourself instantly on a bridge overlooking the city — has to be just about the most dramatic and amazing automobile approach to a city I’ve ever seen. It’s not something I ever get tired of

Yeah, I know a picture would help. Sorry.