Wireless!

I’m sitting on the floor in the living room (because you have to sit on the floor in my living room) with the laptop on the old Korean floor and drinking the reliable pu-er from the big cup that survived the earthquake. The speakers direct God Speed You Black Emperor right at me.

It’s so cool!

I’m strongly conditioned to associate the Internet with my bedroom. I forget I can check e-mail and browse the Web out here. But as soon as I walk into the bedroom, the urge to click steers me into the desk, to the laptop’s footprint and the disconnected cords that flare out from it.

Wild!

I am in better spirits today, due in part to amazing technological advances taking place in my household, yes, but, mostly, I think, due to not having read, watched, or heard any news.

I can sit on the floor like this for hours, apparently.

And since I am apparently going to sit here for hours, this might be a good time to talk about what happened to pfr and my old URL.

My Web site has always been hosted at pfr.che.orst.edu, which is a university-owned machine run by my friend Tom. I have never attended Oregon State and Tom graduated several years ago. Of course he gave me an account when he was a grad student. The machine operated below the radar, forgotten by the professor to whom it belonged and, for a time, abandoned in a cage rarely encountered by anyone. Tom administered it remotely. It’s an old Sparc station dating from the mid-90s, extremely reliable and a stronghold of the free Web, a symbol of the grassroots nature of the Internet. Well, back around X-mas, the /usr/local partition, where the Web server was located, died. The server was running entirely from RAM. A reboot would kill the server, and guess what happened? Tom et al weren’t able to bring it back up long enough (long story as to why) for me to set up a redirect. So here's the site at rapt.org, which I bought a while ago in anticipation of pfr’s demise—I knew the free ride wasn’t going to last forever. But without the redirect, traffic couldn’t follow and now I have this sense that the site's out here in an unpopulated corner.

A few people have the new URL. Some people even wrote to Andrew looking for UFS. I should send the URL around to places that I know link to UFS, but I kind of like being in a void. Except, I don’t like that the site is not indexed by search engines. I like the incidental traffic, when people search for random things and UFS comes up. Those people write to ask who I am or ask if I know anything more about thing for which they searched. That mail is always fun to get.