the pod bay door

This morning, at 12:45 am or so, I lost my connection from my home computer to my web site (sitting on a server in Edmonton). This morning it still wasn’t working. Connecting to my site from other machines worked fine, and is still working at this moment (else I couldn’t post this). I called my hosting service, who said everything was fine, and advised that e-mails are preferred over phone calls. OK, whatever. Meanwhile, this problem, which has happened before, and neither my ISP nor my hosting service could decipher the problem. I’ll check it from home again tonight, and decide what to do next.

I’m growing ever so weary of this.

Update at 5:00 pm – D’OH! What a doofus (I am). While getting pinged repeatedly last night, I loaded a range of IP addresses into my Restricted Zone that included my own IP address. (Slaps self upside the head).

:: It’s one of those days where it’s hard to keep up. I read a post on Geoff’s site that led to comments from Lucas about Textile – A Humane Web Generator, and my brain exploded. It’s like, my brain couldn’t handle one more piece of new, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge blogging/HTML/coding technology today.

:: Tonight I need to rehearse for a Saturday, May 3rd, concert, and refresh my memory about Blogger for an upcoming presentation in May. I’ve done neither yet.

:: Read this post mortem on Napster.

:: Karlin Lillington follows up her interview with William Gibson with this incredible post that links to a 1967 CBC broadcast called Yorkville: Hippie Haven – Yorkville was Canada’s equivalent to Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco at the time. It’s a 14-minute clip, but worth watching. A 19-year old Bill Gibson appears at the beginning and the end of the broadcast – he speaks over top of scenes of him walking about Yorkville. The CBC page notes that the show’s featured hippie, Bill Gibson, is none other than the author of the classic 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, and the man who coined the term “cyberspace.”

:: Dear Dirtbag in St Louis: Please stop making intrusion attempts to my machine. Thank you.

:: Ah, Sunday morning, late April, in Edmonton. The sun is shining, the temperatures beginning to get warm, the birds singing, the kids playing. A nice, hot cuppa joe, the NYTimes, sitting under the canopy in the back yard, and – what? Snow? You’re looking out from my driveway at 10:00 MDT this morning. This is to what we woke up in Edmonton this morning. But it was nowhere near as bad as Calgary, and the rest of southern and central Alberta. I did spend 15 minutes bashing the snow from my Juniper trees, whose branches were bending over from the weight of the very, very wet snow.

:: The year is nearly 1/3 over, and it always seems to be going so quickly. Tomorrow at work we begin two weeks of “spring training”, consisting of a number of in-house workshops and training sessions. In the midst of this, I’ll try to get some regular work done. I’m working on a presentation I will give on June 10 in NYC at the annual SLA Conference, and there is a forthcoming presentation on edu-blogs, which I will be presenting with Geoff on May 22nd.
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:: William Gibson, who started blogging in early January 2003, has (apparently) decided, after three months and such, to give up the activity, at least for now. Or has he?

Gibson is currently in Ireland on a book tour for Pattern Recognition. In an interview with Karlin Lillington in The Irish Times, he notes that to prepare for his next book, he’ll have to give up the blog:

I do know from doing it that it’s not something I can do when I’m actually working. Somehow the ecology of writing novels wouldn’t be able to exist if I’m in daily contact. If I expose things that interest or obsess me as I go along, there’d be no need to write the book. The sinews of narrative would never grow.”

I’ve enjoyed reading his blog entries, as have others, and I will buy the new book soon (I need a break from non-fiction). I met Gibson in Vancouver in the 80s, while still an active member of sf fandom, and saw him a number of times afterwards. He was invited to be a co-Guest of Honour at the ConText’89 in Edmonton, the conference that served as the launchpoint for what is now known as SF Canada, and for the nifty Canadian magazine, Edmonton-based On Spec. The last time I saw him was when he was on tour for Virtual Light, and came through Edmonton. After his reading, Derryl and I rescued him from the masses and took him for a beer on Whyte Avenue.

He said in the interview that he’s giving it up, but he’s posted an entry today. Can we expect more?
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:: 1. What was the last tv show you watched: L&O: SVU.
2. What was the last thing you complained about: making errors transposing chords on a music chart
3. What was the last person you complimented, and what did you say? My musical colleague, Amelia (fiddler); I told her that her new glasses looked very good on her and suited her face quite well.
4. What was the last thing you threw away? A pizza box.
5. What was the last website (besides this one) you visited? Tonya’s.

:: As I type this, the rink announcer in Dallas just announced, “Last minute of play, in the 7th period.” The game between the Dallas Stars and the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim is now the fourth longest in NHL history.

:: What the hey? All this stuff was found in Uday’s Pleasure Palace?

:: Interested in RSS? Read’s Geoff’s piece, then check out this list of RSS Readers.

:: Many of the states in the USA are in deep financial trouble. In Missouri, the governor ordered every third lightbulb unscrewed to save money. (May require registration.)

:: “Is this the dawning of the age of hysteria?” You be the judge.

:: From the Sunday 20 April 2003 NYTimes: “THE RETURN OF SEATTLE Out of the ashes of grunge, Seattle rock has risen again, with bands like the Chromatics, Blood Brothers, Akimbo, Minus the Bear and Pretty Girls Make Graves. Most make a post-punk fracas of harcore, metal-indie-rock, occasional dashes of electronica and T-shirts that are two sizes too small.” (Neil Strauss, Section 2, p24.)

:: In the 8th period (5th overtime), Anaheim won the game.