As these things usually do, the notion has struck me at a time when my access to a computer is going to be restricted for a few days. I am going to to try to hold on to that motivation and actually see it through, though. I’ve had a bit of a rough time this year. Work has had its usual high levels of stress and aggravation. My husband caught a bad case of pneumonia back in January. The 103F fever, scary shaking chills kind of pneumonia. He’s doing well now but is still very tired. I found out yesterday after having some small troubles breathing on Monday night that now I have a mild case of pneumonia. I don’t know if I can blame him for it but I can joke about it. We have plans for this weekend that I really don’t intend to back out of.

Throughout all of it I’ve not really been making time to do things I enjoy and have instead been sort of simply existing. Even my 365 project, which I was so gung ho about a few weeks ago, is fizzling. I missed yesterday and I don’t know that I can make myself take one more bland and completely uninspired photo just so that I can say “Hah! I have a photo for today.” I would much rather put time and effort into finding and taking photos like this:

Opportunities like that don’t come along every day, though. And I know that one has to get out and look for those opportunities but I don’t think I can do that right now.

I am going way off topic. This is what happens when I don’t really have a subject in mind, start writing late in the evening, and then realize that it’s much later in the evening and that I have many, many things to do before I sleep. So. I’m sick but hopefully getting better. Technical things will be going on for echodrift.com over the next few days. DNS servers will be changing so I will wait until everything is settled to start updating again. Updating is something I do fully intend to do. Lots to do this weekend and I’m not ready for it yet.

My host did make an announcement about some nameserver updates but since it really only applied to customers using nameservers I wasn’t supposed to have to do anything. Support had me to manually flush my DNS cache but when that yielded no favorable results they asked if I could change my nameservers anyway, just in case. I was able to for the neglected site but then I remembered: this domain was registered through Netrillium. A few days ago I got a message saying that Netrillium would be merging with AxisHOST. (Aside: I am so tired of businesses and products that are like LowercaseALLCAPS. Do they have any idea how annoying that is to type, especially when you have to refer to them often in typed communications?) As of Wednesday, all domain updates would be handled through the AxisHOST control center and if you didn’t already have an account you needed to request one. Of course I would need to try to update my nameservers on the day they made the switch and I didn’t already have an account.

Honestly, I don’t want to bother with changing nameservers. But, since the company says everything is fine, I don’t have many other options. I’m able to access everything now but I suspect that this is due to my using a different ISP at the moment. If it is something to do with my ISP there isn’t much I can do about that; they’re my only option for cable.

So. Entry on books to come later. You should take a look at my books page to see how large the list has grown in the meantime.

On November 17 I reported this issue to my hosting company. My sister had asked me if my sites were down. I pulled them up and found out that no, they weren’t. Not for me, at least. She was not able to access them for several days. In the following weeks I found out that at seemingly random times, sometimes just hours or even minutes of being able to access either of the sites, the only thing I was able to see was a “Page Load Error” message. During that time I was in communication with the hosting company through their support system regarding this issue. They said that it could have something to do with my ISP. However, it’s not just my ISP. At present I know with certainty that three separate ISPs have issues resolving the domain name. I have been told by others that they also have these problems accessing the site.

According to my host it has never been an issue with the server being down. To my knowledge, my sites are the only ones on the server having issues. I have never been told otherwise. They have informed me that they have been looking into the issue to see if the problem is being caused by something other than my ISP. After several messages back and forth with my host one measure has been taken to possibly fix the situation. I am currently waiting for more information to find out if this has been resolved for good. Since it happens at random to different people it will be difficult to determine.

So I have another favor to ask: If at any time after this you find that you cannot access this site please let me know. A short message to atyler[at]gmail.com will be enough, though if you don’t care to include who your ISP is I would greatly appreciate it.

Next week is a week of training on new software at work so these past two days I’ve been busy preparing machines to be used during training. For many different reasons it hasn’t gone well. The most baffling one is that the software won’t install unless you have a PDF reader installed. The software even shows a list of components that have to be installed before installation can start but a PDF reader isn’t on the list at all. Chalk one up for learning the hard way. This is what I’ve been going on about on twitter today. I saw far too many “Fatal error during installation” messages for my liking. However, towards the end of the day things started going better. I have about half of the machines I need ready so I’m more optimistic about tomorrow.

It looks like work is going to be taking a lot of time and energy for me in the upcoming weeks. I may end up tweeting more than posting because some days I just feel like I couldn’t write a coherent post to save my life.