The blog has been dark for a couple of weeks, and for that I have blog guilt. Not too much guilt, however, since 1) it's my damn blog and 2) I've been genuinely busy.
One of the things that took up a bunch of my time recently has been the move to a new machine. After the recent traumatic downtime experience, several 3AM power outages and a mysterious network outage that had my ISP and the DSL provider first pointing fingers at each other and then at my router (which was conveniently out of warranty), I decided it was time to move. It's a little sad, since this may be the first time in a decade that there won't be some kind of email/web hosting happening out of this house (thanks to many years of Cyborganic servers here), but it was time. Among other things, the economics no longer make sense: I had a business class SDSL line that gave me about 1/3 of the bandwidth for 3 times the price of a consumer ADSL connection, which is silly even there is some kind of vague guarantee of bandwidth availability and a couple extra static IP addresses. I'm willing to live with the tradeoff, so it was time to move.
I was fortunate to have found a bandwidth cooperative with a data center rack and even more fortunate when one of its members expressed interest in selling a machine that was already in the rack. So I bought Brian Ng's box "as is, where is" and enlisted my old friend David Fred to help me with the move. Used to be, you enlisted your strong neighborhood friends to help you carry stuff into your new apartment in exchange for pizza and beer. David, who is a titan of the network world (just look at his resume!) helped me with the heavy intellectual lifting move from across the country in exchange for disk space and bandwidth. Even so, I think it took about three times as long as I would have predicted (with the move of this blog taking up a surprisingly long time—I'm, frankly, amazed that the Movable Type blog moving process is so involved and, considering how well-designed the rest of the application is, so—uh—manual).
Anyway, the new machine is up and running, honored to be sharing rack space with a number of famous domains.
