Disconnected, Daze-Infected ...

So my home ISP, which I use mainly as a dial-up from my Mac, has gone all flakey. I can get e-mail - thank God. I can use the browser to access FTP sites (yes, I usually use Fetch for that at home, but I was trying to troubleshoot, see?), too. But browsing attempts are ... refused. Man, that sounds nasty and hostile! The first time it happened, I had a moment of sheer paranoia and total guilt - what had I done wrong??? And the phone support guy, although very polite, was not much help.

My friend the CommsWizard says that my ISP is a lousy one and that he's also heard that they are messing with their DNS (domain name service and/or servers). This sort of explains why when I tried FTP connection with one Fed site (ours, actually), I could browse the matching website afterward - the FTP attempt had loaded the main part of the domain name for the browser.

The plot thickened when I got home last night and tried my work laptop, back from its upgrade. It could browse via DSL just fine, even without resorting to the office network. CommsWizard said I should just try plugging the DSL modem's cable into the Mac - it should work just fine. But I still want to harrass my ISP until they fix the Mac's dial-up capability! It's the principle of the thing - I'll teach them to do their troubleshooting from some damn script instead of actually listening to what I'm telling them!

I slept badly, possibly because I'd left the Content Management System here at work doing a complete re-publish for the intranet site. The last time I did that, it crapped out after only about 1000 pages/files (the full site is up to more than 9000, including graphics). When I came in this morning, it had finished successfully - yay, go team! My joy was short-lived - now the whole system had gone down, some funky issue with resource management on the application server. And our users are waiting for their morning news clips and daily agenda and all that other good stuff that should have been available by now ... I should just cut my throat now and avoid the mid-morning rush ...

Have I mentioned how much I lurve technology?

Really, I do, but some days it sure doesn't seem to love me ...