Author: Joey deVilla

If you’re a Tucows reseller, this will be of interest to you:

Greetings,

Please read the following important information concerning OpenSRS.

1. Problem at Hosting Facility Impacting Service Availability

At approximately 20:14 UTC or 4:14PM EST today, Tucows redundant power

supply at the IBM data center failed. As a result, the majority of the

services have been impacted to some degree.

• Domain Names: provisioning, management, renewal, and transfers

  offline. This includes WHOIS.

• Email and Email Defense: No mail is lost. Mail delivery may be delayed. Provisioning and management are offline.
• Digital Certificates: Certificates operating normally.

  Provisioning and management are offline.

• Website Builder: Website Builder is operating normally for

  end-users. Provisioning and management are offline.

• Blogware: The service is UNAFFECTED.

Tucows is working closely with IBM to resolve the power problem. At this moment, there is no available restore time.

Tucows will provide regular updates as they are received. Tucows

will also update the Systems Status tool as information is received.

The Systems Status tool is available at:

http://status.tucows.com/.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thank you for your continued support of Tucows.

Sincerely,

Ed Gray

Director, Operations

If you’re a Tucows reseller and felt a great disturbance in the source

(“as if millions of packets suddenly cried out in terror and then were

suddenly silenced”), it’s because the redundant power system at our

co-location itself became redundant.

All services save Blogware have been affected, and crews are on the scene working on the problem. More details as I get them.

Human Events Online, the companion site for an American conservative weekly maagzine, has published what they consider to be the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I’ll agree with their picking the communist ones and Mein Kampf and say that some of Kinsey was silly, but Feminine Mystique? Keynes? John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty? Darwin? No wonder they’ve earned the moniker “wingnuts”.

There’s a bonus list at the bottom of the page: it’s the 15 biggest douchebags of the 21st century.

• The Pixies’ song Here Comes Your Man is the bomb. Literally.
  This

  one’s from Stacy — she links to a lyrics site where one of the

  commenters says that the lyrics to the Pixies’ oddly Beatles-esque and poppiest tune is about Nagasaki.

  Here are the lyrics:

  outside there’s a box car waiting

  outside the family stew

  out by the fire breathing

  outside we wait ’til face turns blue

  i know the nervous walking

  i know the dirty beard hangs

  out by the box car waiting

  take me away to nowhere plains

  there is a wait so long

  here comes your man

  big shake on the box car moving

  big shake to the land that’s falling down

  is a wind makes a palm stop blowing

  a big, big stone fall and break my crown

  there is a wait so long

  you’ll never wait so long

  here comes your man

  there is a wait so long

  you’ll never wait so long

  here comes your man

  The commenter’s theory that the song is about Nagasaki is based on the fact that the delivery vehicle for the A-bomb — named Fat Man — was a B-29 bomber named the Bockscar, which will have flown the mission 60 years ago this August 9th. Given lead vocalist Black Francis‘

  (a.k.a. Frank Black, a.k.a. Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV)

  predilection for odd topics and science in his lyrics, I’d say that

  this commenter could be right.

• Three Men, Three Views

  Lisa lives in Tel Aviv and writes very fascinating pieces about life there. In this entry, she talks to three men…

• An Orthodox settlement leader who lives in Gush Katif
• An artist who curates exhibitions devoted to Israeli/Palestinian coexistence
• A foreign art curator

You’d be surprised what each of them has to say.

• Min Jung Writes About the 14 Stages of Blogging

  Nobody does the funny quite like Min Jung, who’s figured out and documented the lifecycle of bloggers:

  1. “Start reading blogs.”
  2. “You start a blog.”
  3. “You become a stats whore.”
  4. “You become really personal on your site as the online and real-life worlds start confusing you.”
  5. “You faux “retire” from blogging.”
  6. “You cave back into blogging in less than 72 hours.”
  7. “You decide to “get serious” about blogging.”
  8. “You have a pseudo flirty im/blogging/flickr flirting relationship with another blogger whom you have never met.”
  9. “You decide that you must meet other bloggers.”
  10. “You take a step back and metablog about blogging and what blogging has done about your blogging.”
  11. “See step 5.”
  12. “You

      decide that as a result of step 10 and having repeated step 5 more than

      3 times in the course of your lifecycle as a blogger, that you need to

      sanitize or reinvent your blog.”

  13. “You

      either lose your job because of blogging, are afraid of losing your job

      for blogging, or join a company that builds blogging tools.”

  14. “You decide to start an anonymous livejournal blog.”