My previous hosting company — referred to obliquely in the title of this post — blew up in this past week, to the point where I had to make an abrupt decision to pull everything off their servers. Here’s more or less what happens, starting Friday:

• With no warning, my Virtual Private Server account is moved to a new domain name and static IP. (You might wonder what the meaning of “static IP” is under these circumstances.)
• The old VPS instance continues running and is still accessible at its name and IP, so I assume everything is fine. However, all activity on that instance (including SVN commits) are written to a separate disk not associated with the new VPS.
• Those of my sites which are running on the new VPS instance break, because the new instance is misconfigured and can’t reach the DB server. Also its postfix install turns out to be broken due to bad permissions setup. So the new VPS is basically hosed.
• I wait over 48 hours for support to return my emails while my sites are down. I do not even receive an auto-reply for almost 36 hours.
• The same backup cron job is running on both VPS instances, unbeknownst to me. The job on the new instance backs up stale data that overwrites on the backups from the old VPS (which is still in use, because I haven’t been told yet which is the “real” instance).
• Support fixes the new VPS so it can reach the DB server, and the old VPS is removed. I switch all remaining services to the new VPS but start the process of pulling out.
• Support tells me that I was mistakenly charged for a hosting plan along with the VPS account, cancels the hosting plan, and credits my account with the prepaid balance. With the disappearance of the hosting plan, all my databases and user accounts promptly disappear before I can back them all up and migrate them elsewhere. All sites down again.
• Support reinstates the hosting plan. I pull everything remaining over to Slicehost and get it running again there.

It’s sad, because this hosting provider used to be a good deal, and delivered exactly what I needed at the point when I first started using them. I wish I could say the same today.

Before leaving San Francisco for home in Cambridge, I stopped at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero to pick up a few gifts for home. Among them was a small muffin-sized package of delicious, creamy Mount Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, CA, a favorite of my wife’s. I stashed it in my shoulder bag before catching the BART train to the airport.

Arriving at SFO I pleasantly breezed through the metal detector on my way to the gate and waited for my bag and laptop to come through the X-ray machine. The pleasant breezing sensation then came to an abrupt halt, as did the X-ray conveyor belt. My bag went back and forth through the machine several times.

“Can I please open your bag, sir?” a TSA contractor asked me. Her shoulder insignia read “Centurion Security Services, S.A.F.E.S.K.I.E.S.” emblazoned on a ferocious eagle-and-flag backdrop. I wondered what on earth the super-sized acronym could possibly stand for.

“No problem.” I’m not inclined to be overly protective of my bags’ privacy in these sad police-state times we live in. I assumed that the shape or size of something in my bag reminded someone of a sample X-ray they remember from the TSA X-ray Analysis training seminar. I didn’t want my behavior to remind someone of something they saw in some other TSA seminar, such as that fascinating Strip-Search Profiling Criteria class they took. I put my shoes back on and waited while, after several rummages, the cheese emerged. Much examination and discussion took place as the cheese was passed around and looked at from many angles. It received several prods and squeezes.

“We’ll run your bag through again, sir.”

“No problem,” I said. I was thinking, “Good, they’ve determined it’s merely a cheese, and once my bag scans OK, I’m out of here.”

The bag went back, came through again. But my cheese was not freed. Without further consultation with me, my TSA handler escorted my cheese to a holding area where several other TSA types were lurking. (I wanted to write, “She frogmarched my cheese to a holding area,” because it sounds so much better, but two people are required to frogmarch a cheese and there was only one of her.) There was much more discussion and cheese-prodding. My handler came back sans fromage, as they say at French security checkpoints.

“Sir, how much does your cheese weigh?”

“I don’t know.”

“There is a rule that you cannot bring liquids or gels over three ounces past the TSA checkpoint.”

“I know that, but this cheese is not a gel. It is just a soft cheese.” Inwardly I wondered if cheese was in fact a gel, technically speaking. It didn’t really matter, though. These people were not about to engage in arguments about whether cheese was a gel, a sol, a colloidal emulsion, or any other hair-splitting nonsense employed by classic strip-search candidates.

“It’s the consistency, sir. It is creamy. It is a creamy cheese. Also, there is no weight on the label.” (I breathed a sigh of relief and silently thanked Cowgirl Creamery’s label designer for this lapse of specificity.) “We’re going to have to weigh it.”

The action shifted back to the bevy of cheese-handlers. They seemed indecisive. No scale appeared to be handy as they passed the cheese among themselves, looking concerned and non-plussed. I was gearing up and considering my options. I was just deciding that it would be an appropriate bureaucratic revenge to assert my right to take home exactly three ounces of cheese when the group apparently gave up. My handler returned, cheese in hand.

“Sir, please come over here with me.” We went over to one of those explosive-analysis units. I unconsciously put my bag down on its metal surface. “NO!!! DO NOT put that bag there, sir!” I removed it, but I was relieved. I could feel a lecture coming on, which meant that the cheese might soon be free after being duly reprimanded for its creaminess.

She pointed to the TSA rules posted on the unit. “Sir, our rules clearly state that passengers may only take three ounces or less of gels or liquids in a clear transparent bag. This cheese is a gel consistency, but you do not have a transparent bag.”

“It’s true that I don’t have a bag. But, miss, I think you can understand why I might not have realized that cheese would be considered a gel by the TSA.”

“If you had checked the TSA website, you would have known that you needed a bag.” I did not argue about whether I could have checked the TSA website. My cheese was now in one of those WW II POW escape movies. It had escaped the cellblock via a clever plot, but still had to don the stolen SS uniform and make it past the guards at the perimeter fence. “Here is a bag,” said my handler. She produced a small Ziploc, placed the cheese inside, sealed it tightly, but did not return it yet. There was a long, pregnant pause as the searchlights swept the ground, looking for escapees. “When you go through the checkpoint, this is the kind of bag you must place it in.”

“Yes, miss. I will do that in the future.” She gave me the cheese and, reunited, the cheese and I left for Gate A6. It’s been kind of a bonding experience, to the tell the truth. I may hold onto that Mount Tam as a souvenir, at least until the smell becomes a bit strong. Or until my wife eats it. Whichever is sooner.

Altogether I logged 1,660 access points during the train journey, one of which was named “Jesus”. The naming of wireless routers should rightly occupy an odd little niche in social anthropology. When you look at this many access point names, a couple of points become clear. People name these things with an awareness that the names are publicly visible. At the same time, these names belong to private spaces, and a lot of the names have private significance. A wireless name is a little like a button with a personalized slogan, only you can’t see the person wearing it.

As a rough jump-start to this discipline, here’s an organized digest of some of the access points that I rolled past:

Home Sweet Home

• Jimmy’s Place
• Kobes-Castle
• rejectbarn
• rockpile
• HoMe
• homey
• DAWGHOUSE

Shout-outs

• CATS_bklyn
• Harrison Represent Yo (near Harrison, NY)
• OakHill_Boomerang

Network Sweet Network

• Mi Gente Network
• YupNet
• Ken’s Extreme Network

Screen Names/Handles

• lillamb
• Fruity
• kittyup
• katburki
• spoiledone
• toughguy
• SirKnight
• Sweetness
• Geek06583_Clark

Cultural References

• Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch
• Napoleon Dyno
• Night Rider
• Me van a Matar por las Mujeres

Cryptic

• ManTown
• Sitivity
• apSSIDiointerpol
• Deshmukh (I had thought this could be Klingon, but a reader pointed out that it’s a common Hindi surname. Possibly the network owner is bilingual in Klingon and Hindi.)
• Numbers

I miss…

• Texas
• Florida
• Sonoma
• phoenixarizona
• dakotaboy1
• riven (some people spent a lot of time there)

We Want Your Business

• Pay3$@javajoes
• H@rv3yguns (why the hacker orthography?)
• Holiday inn Bridgeport (also could be read as the very unlikely concept, “Holiday in Bridgeport”)

We Don’t Want Your Business

• Dont Touch This Router
• Mine
• Not For You
• BuyYourOwn (amazingly, this network was not encrypted)
• fuck you

Islands In The Crowd

• redsox (at the western end of Connecticut)
• yankees (at the eastern end of Rhode Island)

No, dear reader, I am not in fact coordinated enough to play Zelda or Wii Sports while pedaling furiously. (OK… make that semi-furiously.) What I am able to do is surf the web using the Wii’s built-in web browser, pointing and clicking the Wii Remote in one hand while maintaining pace and position on the bike. And this, from my point of view, is one very good reason to get hold of one of these gadgets. Now I can read a wide variety of stuff while doing my workout, and exercise free choice over it. That’s progress!

There are plenty of other reasons to check out the Wii. The remote (which has 6 degrees of free motion as well as buttons and internal accelerometers) is a really interesting input device, and it can interface via Bluetooth with a PC or Mac, and folks are coming out with some great homebrew hardware and software to provide connectivity for developers. Combine the remote with Flex, WiiFlash and Papervision3D, and suddenly you’re looking at an impressive 3D visualization platform. Hmmm…

I’m not going to attempt the usual lengthy writeup. It somehow feels as though it would retroactively disturb the quiet that pervaded the trip. Instead, I encourage you to
view the photo album.

I will say that Lubec, Maine is an extremum in a state that is itself an extremity. It contains the easternmost point in the U.S, a rocky headland looking out into the Bay of Fundy. This is a calm place, several hours’ drive past Acadia, a world beyond the high water mark of the tourist tide that sluices through the Maine Coast every summer. As a visitor, one feels foreign, not catered to, an observer in a place and a culture where observers thankfully do not seem to have much influence. It’s a privilege to experience, and I suppose it cannot last. I am grateful to have seen it a few times.

Locoweed K. Patrolman <dave923@gothicinnbi.com>: “Loco” was the only child of a state trooper and a whorehouse madam in the desolate high plains of West Texas. He acquired his unusual last name due to a mixup on his birth certificate; his father, never a detail man, accidentally wrote his occupation where the child’s intended last name (Smith) should have been. Young Locoweed’s isolated environment led him early to computers and the Internet as a means of connecting with other people and feeding his hunger for information about the outside world. An almost obsessive fascination with chemistry and biology overtook him; he spent hours in the basement, perfecting complex organic syntheses. One fateful morning, one of his mother’s regular customers joined the family for a hearty pancake breakfast. When this gentleman, one Wrongly Q. Arctic by name, mentioned that he was a traveling representative of a major pharmaceutical company, Loco instantly struck up a conversation, and out there in the arid Texan wilderness an online business was born. Loco would synthesize cheap but effective knockoffs of prescription drugs and handle all the email, and Wrongly would write the clever, unique advertising copy, handcrafting it for each customer with folksy spellings and turns of phrase. In under one year, Locoweed earned enough to help his folks not only pay off the mortgage, but refurbish their establishment’s somewhat somber decor in a more traditional and welcoming style.

belajio5 <ylubikanmiu@yahoo.com>: Ylubikanmiu Bellagio, Jr. was born in the slums of Naples in 1975, the youngest son in a troubled family. His mother, an Albanian, left home when he was only 3 years old; his father was a hopeless drug addict. Left to fend for himself much of the time, young Ylubi (as he was called by his friends) sold candy and spumoni on the tough Neapolitan streets, a canny urchin barely scratching out a living. When he was 20, his father died, his ice cream business collapsed, and his girlfriend left him for another man who was using Advanced Gain Pro Penis Enlargement Pills. It was there, at the bottom of the bottom, that Ylubi heard about an obscure traditional herbal distillate peddled by his Albanian half-uncle that had the power to change lives. After only a single dose, not only was he suddenly awash in hot dates, but he realized he had a hell of a product on his hands. Branding the herbal concoction “Ultra Allure Pheromones”, he made it his life goal to share his good fortune with others through the miracle of direct online marketing. Thanks to his passionate emails that he personally composes for each and every sales prospect, Ylubi has prospered. He now lives in Key West, Florida, a successful and happy entrepreneur whose chief satisfaction is helping others experience their sex lives to the fullest extent possible.

Oksana <admin@mydatingrussiaweb.info>: Oksana Karushchenko, to be perfectly plain, is just a lonely 25 year old Russian woman with a human heart like yours or mine. As if being lonely wasn’t bad enough, she suffers terribly from the stereotyped responses of most people who receive her emails: they assume she is a brassy, mobbed-up gold-digger who’s only looking for a wealthy American mark with a credit card account to drain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ms. Karushchenko is not only a delicate, sensitive and frail beauty, but is also a woman of considerable and independent means. She was the only daughter of a corrupt party functionary who for years ran Komkatlit, the state kitty litter monopoly, with an iron fist. After the fall of communism he made billions of rubles from kickbacks and bribes before he died, leaving Oksana with the delicate problem of how to move this ill-gotten fortune out of Russia. All she seeks is a thoughtful, selfless man who wants to share life and love with her, while living out the rest of his days in unimaginable wealth and luxury. Nonetheless, people assume the worst of her when they discover she needs a mere $10,000 advance to pay for an Ill-Gotten Gains Export Permit from the Russian government. Sometimes her quest feels doubtful, but in the meantime, Oksana sits and studies her English, hoping against hope that there is one man left in the West who has not yet lost the simple ability to believe.

I resisted the idea for a long time, because figured I was spending enough minutes of my day in front of a computer as it is. Despite the very technical nature of my work, I don’t really use computers a whole lot outside of my job, except for occasional routine household tasks. But, in the end, I have to admit that this is just the best way of getting certain kinds of information out to the world!