if nobody can hear you does that mean...whistle, whistle while patiently waiting for the dns system to do it's thing.

i can access the site usually, but i hear it's sporadically unavailable. and i'm still not getting any e.mail which makes me wonder if i've set up the mx record correctly. hi. hi. you'd think i'd learn my lesson about setting up secondary dns. after 3 years of faultless - and free - service, it looks like mydomain was brought down by a DoS attack . curiously another vendor i deal with, servepath was also brought down the night before by an "unprecedented" denial of service attack. hmmm.

so, the verisign story. in the fiasco yesterday i was nearly caught in a very ugly catch-22. i needed to change the name servers. but i'd long ago forgotten and lost the username and password associated with my account. and my contact and e.mail info had long since gone defunct. yes, friends. i had just dramatically reduced the number of ways that i could prove that i am i.

i've known this for quiet some time and was pleasantly surprised when i discovered that i could renew the domain without having the usename and password handy. i also dreaded the day that i'd need to somehow prove to verisign that i am indeed, eric snowdeal. and not my dad who is also eric snowdeal. or even more improbably my grandfather who, although deceased, was also eric snowdeal. you get the picture. well, the day of reckoning had arrived. i was going to call verisign ! i made sure i got good and irritated by scouring the house one more time for any evidence that i was the owner of the domain. and i found one. back in august, we received one of the last pieces of e.mail that was forwarded from our old address that has a new password to my account. for security reasons, they were sending the username separately. i never received the usename. nonetheless, password in hand i dialed the support number. astonishingly, in ten minutes i was talking to a real person and explained the situation. she asked for the password and then gave me the username. just like that.

so a crisis was averted, but i shudder to think of what could have happened if the person who received the username in the mail decided to call verisign and get the password. yikes.

just to keep the universe perfectly in balance, while verisign was being so helpful my six-month old ibook decided to suddenly and unexpectedly fail. it just started going into a sleep of death. initial attempts at recussitation by resetting the power management unit , seemed promising but ultimately ended in failure.

so that sucks.

and i'm fighting off a nasty flu. while my wifes violently expells fluids every hour, i sit in a constant, low-grade state of nausea in perpetua.

praise murphy.