A funny little Colbert clip explaining the recent mergers in the telcom field. I found this especially amusing because the company my dad worked for as a kid was bought by AT&T, only to be spun off a few years later.
Katy and I were back in Minnesota for the weekend and were able to experience our first real winter of the year. On the way back, I switched the clock in my car into thermometer mode and played a variation of the childhood game warmer/colder with the positive and negative reinforcements reversed. When we left Champaign, it was 36 degrees, and arrived to a balmy 4. It even snowed over the weekend to cap off our winter excursion. Global warming hasn’t totally won yet.
Apparently there are some discoloration issues with the old SNESes. It was a little shocking when I first got the unit from ebay. At this point, the more annoying fact is that there is some loose change rattling around inside the thing.
Today marks the completion of my first year of blogging. 152 posts in 365 days. Not too bad, though granted I tend to post random short stuff, like links to interesting websites (or at least stuff I find interesting). All-in-all, I think I’ve done my part to give back to the great ring of procrastination — the world wide web.
Well, I’m not sure if that’s the official title, but pretty much. Today Dusty received an offer to be a lecturer in the UIUC CS Department. He’ll be teaching CS 230 this semester as well as something I don’t remember over the summer. What’s scary is that he has two TAs working under him. Congrats Dusty!
From the perfect temperature to the process of paining the lines, this article from How Stuff Works has all the info.
In 24-36 hours, the problems with the quotes website should be resolved. I thought it was Comcast’s problem, but before I called them, I took a look at my Network Solutions registry and ended up finding the real problem. The primary DNS server for the morlok.net domain was dns.morlok.net (70.89.203.89) but the 2nd and 3rd servers were set to gofast. Those remaining entries must not have been transitioned when I setup my own DNS hosting. Anyway, corrected the entries so that only my primary DNS server and my secondary DNS server (dns2.morlok.net — 70.89.203.90) are listed. For whatever reason, people on Comcast must have been having problems getting to the primary DNS server, and then they would have been sent to the backup. Or else there was some sort of situation when a Comcast DNS was caching things from when it couldn’t reach the server (perhaps due to the recent internet outage on my parent’s house) and that was causing the problem. Anyway, after the DNS cache clears itself, the problem should be resolved.
I’ve been receiving some complaints lately that the quotes website hasn’t been working. I’m pretty sure it’s a DNS problem that’s actually coming from Comcast. Everyone who has complained has been using Comcast, and even during supposed outages, I’ve been able to get to it from my home in Illinois, from UIUC and from UMN. Brogs sent me the following information from Comcast during the last outage:
%> Dig quotes.morlok.net
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 10793
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;quotes.morlok.net. IN ANY
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
morlok.net. 75 IN SOA ns.gofast.net. hostmaster.gofast.net. 2005122301 86400 7200 604800 900
;; Query time: 38 msec
;; SERVER: 68.87.77.130#53(68.87.77.130)
;; WHEN: Mon Jan 8 00:04:30 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 92
Comcast is trying to do the lookup with gofast, our old ISP which we no longer use. Later, within the conversation, he got the following info:
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20160
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;quotes.morlok.net. IN ANY
;; ANSWER SECTION:
quotes.morlok.net. 604800 IN A 70.89.203.89
;; Query time: 74 msec
;; SERVER: 68.87.77.130#53(68.87.77.130)
;; WHEN: Mon Jan 8 00:16:35 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 51
So the problem is intermittent. If you have problems, you can always try http://www.morlok.net/quotes but I’ve heard that can have problems with links. If anyone else experiences problems, please let me know as I’d like to get on Comcast’s case for this.
I’ve been calorie counting for years. Even though I’m never really on a diet (a diet implies something that’s temporary) I do think it’s important to understand what you’re eating. For those of you who don’t always pay attention out there this site might be of interest to you. It shows 200 calories in a variety of different foods, and makes you appreciate how many calories processed and deep fried food actually have.
I wasn’t actually there, but Shanley was nice enough to post pictures from the Minnesota New Years party. Not as many pictures as we’d normally have, as apparently Brogs was out sick. Feel better Mike!