Fixed : Accessing the Almanac, Not Fixed : Accessing the MoveOn Virtual Primary
Posted on June 24, 2003 at 11:07 am | No Comments
If you’re a semi-regular surfer to my site, you’ve probably noticed the occasional instance when you’d try to get here and you’d just… well, hang. And then you’d get an error. The old familiar “Page Cannot Be Displayed” message.
Well, to quote an ex-girlfriend… “It’s not you, it’s me.”
Apparantly my registrar (aka the company I registered my domain name with) had trouble pointing to the correct IP address for my webserver. Basically, it wasn’t always able to talk to the Domain Name Servers (DNS) at my webspace provider.
After some phone calls and a few tech support emails, my provider finally forked over some new DNS server names to give my registar… apparantly the ones they originally gave me (DNS1 and DNS2) were so old they were gathering mold. I switched over to DNS5 and DNS6, and voila. No more connection issues.
Oh, sorry, did I just put you to sleep?
To summarize : It was broke, now it’s not.
Getting here should be far less annoying from now on. As for the actual content… well, I can’t promise anything there.
In other “Page Cannot Be Displayed” news…
MoveOn.org, the online political action organization that boasts 1.4 million members, officially started it’s “virtual primary” today, where registered participants can vote online for their preferred Democratic Presidential Candidate. If any one of the candidates gets more than 50% of the vote, MoveOn will endorse them… and that’s an pretty big deal.
Unfortunately, soon after voting opened this morning, their webservers took a nosedive and crashed hard. Not ready for the volume of traffic, apparantly. Slightly embarrassing for them, but exciting to know that so many people are interested in this political picking and clicking.
If you look to the upper right, you can probably guess who I’m planning to vote for, so I hope I actually get to vote. It’d be a shame if this whole thing gets spoiled by an unprepared, if well-intentioned, IT crew.
12:30pm – an update : It looks like they’re back up and limping. It’s possible to get through, but it might take more than a few attempts. Consider my vote cast and counted.
Get Inspired : Dean envisions “The Great American Restoration”
Posted on June 23, 2003 at 1:44 pm | No Comments
The text of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign kick-off speech, titled The Great American Restoration, is already online, and it’s an inspiring read. No matter where your loyalties lay, it’s worth a look. My favorite bit…
“Our President and too many in Washington are giving away our future so that we pass to our children not a flickering flame of freedom � but the chain of insurmountable debt.
No parent would do this � and America must not do this.
And so for me the long journey of a Presidential campaign has begun with the people I have met affecting me far more than any affect I may have had on them. And because of that, the reasons why I seek the Presidency have changed.
This campaign is about more than issue differences on health care, tax cuts, national security, jobs, the environment and our economy. It is about something as important as our children. It�s about who we are as Americans.
Here are the words of John Winthrop: �We shall be as one. We must delight in each other, make other�s conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always living before our eyes our Commission and Community in our work.�
It is that ideal, the ideal of the American community, that we seek to restore.”
More in link. Go read… and Go Dean!