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A Saturday Afternoon in Winston-Salem

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dscf3163

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:

dscf3151

Weird Technical Issue

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.

Friday Morning

It’s off to Pittsburgh this afternoon to meet my hubby for a weekend of random yet targeted exploration.

As of about midnight last night, I wasn’t 100% sure I was going to make it. First, there was car trouble starting on Tuesday. That’s not yet resolved, so I’ll be taking Mark’s Oldsmobile rather than my Buick (yeah, we’re geezers…). Then, my Thursday resulted in a veritable flood of last minute work that made it seem almost as if there were a conspiracy to keep me in Winston-Salem and in front of my computer for about four days straight. But I got past it and had some lucky breaks this morning, so things are now looking good for an early afternoon departure.

Otherwise, it was a very good Thursday, which brought some potentially very good news, about which I shan’t elaborate at this time. Not only that, but they weren’t out of anything at the Elliott Center salad bar at lunch, which is a minor miracle. And I got to spend most of the day getting paid to look at old newspapers. So I shouldn’t complain. Not that that’s ever stopped me before…

Dramatic

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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.

OK, so…

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I was being all coy Sunday and earlier today and no one seems to be biting, so I’ll spill it. The thing I did Sunday was make an offer on that cute little house. Said offer was accepted on Monday, which means that yer humble host and his husband are on the way to owning a second home — an urban vacation oasis, if you will — in one of my (our) favorite cities for a surprisingly low price.

I was hoping there might at least be a little speculation, what with the clues and everything. Oh well.

Sad

guidinglight

Guiding Light, the oldest dramatic series on American TV (or maybe any other, for that matter) has been cancelled after seventy-two years on radio and TV. Almost all the shows I watched as an impressionable child while staying with Oleene are long gone now.

I occasionally find myelf looking for old soap opera video online. It’s some of the ultimate TV ephemera, as most of the early shows were done live and are lst forever. Even after the advent of videotape in the 1960s, most sopar operas and game shows (along with Johnny Carson, etc.) were not deemed worthy of longterm preservation and were just recorded over by shortsighted networks. Miraculously, Dark Shadows is one of the few 1960s soaps that survived more or less in its entirety, paving the way for a successful syndication run and DVD release. Match Game is one of the few 1970s game shows that was similarly preserved, essentially giving GSN most of its start-up programming.