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Happy Canada Day!

To all of my Canadian friends online and off, happy Canada Day! May your fireworks be awesome and your holiday dinners be tasty.

To those of you in Newfoundland or with Newfoundland connections, I hope your Memorial Day is suitable as well.

And I’d like to dedicate this post to awesome Canadian things! Please to enthuse at me, my friends, about things or people or places or books or music which are a) awesome, and b) Canadian! Here are mine:

Music: Great Big Sea, La Bottine Souriante, Le Vent du Nord, La Volee d’Castors, Les Charbonniers de l’Enfer, Natalie MacMaster, Ashley MacIsaac, the Paperboys, Jeremy Fisher, the Irish Descendants, the Fables, the Punters.

Actors and Actresses: Nathan Fillion, Jewel Staite, Grace Park (played Boomer on BSG), Tricia Helfer (played Six on BSG)

Authors: Tanya Huff, Julie Czerneda

Places: Stanley Park in Vancouver

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A bold new era of Internet that doesn’t suck

We’re not quite done settling everything on the new net yet. But I can bring you this tasty evidence of our new bandwidth:

Meanwhile: for those of you who connect to the Murkmush via newmoon, you might find that you can’t get to the MUSH from that server. If so, you might try connecting to lodestone instead and running tinyfugue there. I encourage people to run tf on newmoon usually but we do have an install of it on lodestone as well.

userinfosolarbird reminds me that the 209.20.199.10 address on newmoon has in fact been turned off, since unlike lodestone and door, newmoon can’t handle two addresses at once. For web purposes, this is really only of interest to those of you for whom we’re supporting mail on domains as well as web. If we’re supporting mail for you, your web hits go by default to newmoon, and I have to punt them over to lodestone instead. But since newmoon can’t talk to the old address any more, this means newmoon will just lose any hits sent to domains that still map to it.

Long story short, just keep doublechecking if your domains have caught up with the new IP addresses yet. Let me know if you have any questions!

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Murkworks web update

For those of you keeping track, DNS changes have as of this afternoon still not fully made it out into the wild. I’m seeing several of our domains at half-propped status, with both versions (with and without www) not agreeing on whether they’re pointing at the old addresses or the new ones.

I cannot currently tell if this is an Apache problem, because the old addresses are not answering connections at all–if I try to throw my web browser directly at 209.20.199.10 or 209.20.199.11, the connection times out and never actually makes it to the servers. So there’s nothing in the Apache logs for me to debug. Note that the exact same servers are happily accepting web connections sent to the new addresses, though.

So, if you have web content with us on the Murk and you still can’t get to it, have patience and keep checking. Your domain probably isn’t fully propped yet. If you want to doublecheck whether it has or not, and you don’t know how to do that, here’s how:

  • Windows computers: Open a command prompt and type ‘nslookup’, then a space, then your domain. For example, ‘nslookup annathepiper.org’.
  • Mac computers or Linux: Open a command prompt and do the same thing as with a Windows computer, only using the ‘host’ command instead of ‘nslookup’. For example, ‘host annathepiper.org’.

If you get back an address that starts with 209, that’s the old address. One that starts with 173 is the new one.

Questions, let me know! And thanks for your patience, Murknet peeps!

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Murknet websites status update

userinfosolarbird is taking care of most of the technical work to transfer our network over to the new connection, but the websites are on me. So I’m making a clean sweep through all of the websites we’re supporting, to try to make sure that they’re all still connecting properly.

And, Internets, I could use your help! We host the following domains. Please let me know if you can reach them both with and without www at the beginning of the URL:

  • aerialscribe.com
  • angelakorrati.com
  • annathepiper.org
  • baconforbirds.com
  • crimeandtheforcesofevil.com
  • enchantedquills.com
  • lexfa.org
  • mediababe.org
  • miminoyes.com
  • monsterhat.com
  • murkworks.net
  • pecktavern.com
  • pmjohnsondesign.com
  • solarbird.net
  • unseeliecourt.net
  • upcc.org
  • uplakekenmore.org
  • uplake.org

ALSO, and this is IMPORTANT:

If you own a domain hosted at our site, you should log into whatever registrar you’re using to make sure that your references to our name servers are up to date. Drop me a comment or send me email at my gmail address (annathepiper) to doublecheck what name servers you should be using!

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Heads up all, shiny new Murknet on the way!

I just got the confirmation from Comcast: we will be having SHINY! NEW! INTERNET! installed this coming Thursday between 8am and 12pm. userinfosolarbird will be working with the tech to get everything up and running.

This means that any of you folks out there who have or use resources on our net may notice weirdness in our web pages or mailing lists or server accessibility over the next couple of weeks as things get updated, and as the changes propagate out onto the net at large. So please have patience! And once everything settles, you should hopefully even notice much better speed for loading web pages and the like.

If you have files on our servers, either newmoon or lodestone, now would be a very good time to doublecheck that you have backups. Make sure in particular that you have off-site copies of anything critical. If you need help getting to any of your files, let me know!

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The things I think of

Yesterday I had an eye exam, which required me to alter my usual morning commute–and sacrificed my daily morning swing through Pike Place Market, on the grounds that I could get to work a lot faster after my appointment was done if I took the 30 and went practically straight to Big Fish, vs. taking a 70-something and going downtown and doing the usual marketwalk.

So when I went through the market in the evening, the Handsomest of Marketboys gave me this stern “where the hell were you?” look and was all “we were going to call hospitals and everything!” To wit: HA. And also, clearly I must make a point of informing my marketpeeps (I must now say marketpeeps since now they have a marketgirl!) in advance when I will not be making my usual rounds.

Which of course led me, geekily brained as I am, to imagining a helpful web page they could consult in further situations of this nature, possibly called isangelacomingtothemarket.com. It would include options like:

  • Yes! Save me a banana!
  • Yes! Those raspberries aren’t going to eat themselves!
  • Yes! userinfosolarbird demands cherries!
  • No! My bus broke down and I’m running late!
  • No! I’m home sick with a cold/the flu/the plague/Kellis-Amberlee!
  • No! I’m working late tonight because all the servers are on FIRE and the QA team is frantically trying to verify when things will be fixed!
  • No! We’re going out to sushi tonight. Mmmmmmm soooooooshi.
  • No! userinfosolarbird and I are heading to Vancouver/Portland/Newfoundland for a Great Big Sea roadtrip! Because blackberries are swoonable and all but they still don’t beat Alan Doyle With a Bouzouki!
  • No! The Murkworks has gone to Disneyland!
  • No! The latest Dresden Files just dropped and I am putting EVERYTHING on hold until I find out what happened to Harry. I’m sure you understand!
  • No! I just sold a novel and am too busy bouncing around the house shrieking!
  • No! I just got my latest rejection letter and am busy sulking at the cats.
  • No! The zombies have risen in Kenmore and userinfosolarbird, userinfospazzkat and I are currently huddled in the upper floor of our house, shooting zombies out of the second story front bedroom window. If I don’t survive, Marc, you can have my iPad as promised. Unless you’re the zombie that killed me.

What else would be on this web page, do you think? Suggest options in the comments!

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Survey of Murkworks.net usage

Hi all,

Dara and I wanted to communicate with everybody that in the last many months we have been highly, HIGHLY dissatisfied with the state of our Internet service at the Murkworks. The quality of service we’ve had has been extremely erratic; our bandwidth has been very unstable, and far too often we’ve been actively down. This cannot continue.

But in order to make informed decisions about what course of action to pursue to improve matters, we need to hear about who’s using the Murkworks resources regularly, and in what fashion. So if you’re doing anything regularly on our servers, please let us know.

This includes but is not limited to:

  • Hosting personal or professional web pages, whether for yourself or an organization
  • A regularly maintained email account
  • An active mailing list
  • Primary or secondary DNS for domains
  • Using account space for a backup of personal files

So please check in, folks. It’s important for us to get a real sense of who’s actively using the system. Thanks!

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Several awesome things make a post

I’ve been total Scattershot Girl when it comes to blogging for some time–like many, I’ve found most of my day to day online communication shunted over to Twitter and Facebook. But that said, I’ve had several recent lovely things happen that are worth sharing with you all in longer, blog-based form. So! In no particular order:

  • Finally saw The King’s Speech, since userinfospazzkat got it via Netflix. That was a very satisfying film, and I’m not at all surprised that it’s spawned so much fanfic across my various Friends lists and such. Everyone in that film did an amazing job, and I have much increased respect for Mr. Colin Firth now. Also, mad love for the scene where the speech therapist’s wife comes home and discovers the King and Queen in her dining room. :D

  • Also, as of today, finally saw Source Code with userinfosolarbird. Mad, mad props to userinfomamishka for recommending that! It’s a nice, tight little SF flick, and if you like alternate-reality type plots, try to catch this before it vanishes entirely. If you’re local to Seattle, it’s still playing at the Meridian 16 downtown, and it’s running at the Crest as well.

  • I have finally found a way I might actually read more comic books: the Dark Horse comics app for the iPad. I installed this on the grounds that a couple weekends back, Dark Horse had a sale of all its digital versions of Serenity and Firefly comics. Since I didn’t have Shepherd’s Tale yet, I thought what the hey, I’d buy ’em all. The iPad is definitely more suited to digital comics reading than the iPhone, that’s for sure, although the iPhone does actually talk to this app as well.

    Also on the iPad, I have a shiny new app called TunePal, recommended to me by Marilyn, one of the fiddle players who attends the weekly session userinfosolarbird and I have been going to. Those of you who know the Shazam app will find the way this works familiar; it basically identifies songs. But in this case, it identifies traditional Irish tunes! You can play them at the app on an actual instrument, or, it’ll identify ’em if you’re playing them in iTunes as well. Then it goes out and hits up a big ol’ database and yoinks back several guesses as to what it thinks you just played it. It’ll show you sheet music for its guesses, and it’ll play the sheet music for you as well. And, you can add tunes out of the database manually by searching for them as well. You can’t import your own tunes, which is my only complaint about the app, but it’s otherwise very, very cool. Any of my fellow music geeks out there who are interested in trad tunes, you should be checking this out.

  • Speaking of the iPhone, my coworker Joe pointed me at my new favorite iPhone game: Tiny Wings. You play a birdie with, of course, tiny tiny wings, and the object of the game is to get the birdie to fly as far as possible by tapping. It’s super-cute and only 99 cents, so check it out.

  • FOLKLIFE! Well, that deserves a whole separate post, but I’m noting it here anyway.

  • And while I am still technically on book buying hiatus, I’ve picked up a few freebies. And I will unrepentantly, UNREPENTANTLY I TELL YOU, break hiatus wide open to buy userinfoseanan_mcguire/Mira Grant’s Deadline this week. Because GIMME. Seriously.

  • My friend userinforavyngyngvar is sending me a Blu-Ray of a-ha’s last concert in Oslo! Thank you, Yngvar!

  • I am sorely behind on Doctor Who posts, and will shortly be doing a catchup post. It’s an indicator of how much I’ve not been paying attention to the net lately that I totally missed that BBC America did NOT air the second half of the two-parter on Saturday, to wit, bah. I did not however give enough of a damn about this to actually try to find and download the episode; it’ll air next week as far as I know, and I can wait that long. Especially given that we’re about to have the mid-season hiatus anyway. Just nobody spoil me, mmkay, those of you who’ve already caved and downloaded the ep anyway?

  • And because it’s always worth saying, mmmmm blackberries of my marketboys mmmmmm.
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Book Log #6: Demon Hunts, by C.E. Murphy

Demon Hunts

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Those of you who follow my book reviews know I’m a big fan of C.E. Murphy’s work, and you need look no further than Demon Hunts, Book Five of the Walker Papers series, for a fine example as to why. At this point we’re far enough in on the series that all of the major characters are pretty much established–and yet, this is still a reasonably self-contained story, one which may not confuse a casual reader who happens to start with this one as an introduction to the series. (I wouldn’t recommend this necessarily as a starting point, just because there are references to earlier books and those will mean more if you’ve read them, yet they’re light-handed enough to not leave one totally lost.)

As of this book, Joanne Walker is a firmly established detective of the Seattle PD, with Billie Holiday as her partner. She’s gotten a lot more comfortable with her powers and her general place in the world, and as a result, is a much more likeable character than the Joanne of the first couple of books. A significant character from the earlier books makes a satisfying comeback here, and his return is important not only to Joanne’s own character development, but to the progression of things between herself and her boss Michael Morrison as well (to which this loyal fan says YAY!).

The biggest thing I liked about this installment, though, was the main plot. A wendigo is on the loose in Seattle, tearing victims apart so thoroughly that not even their souls are left behind for Billie to trace with his own gifts. Joanne’s hunt for this creature has a lot more focus to it than her previous supernatural outings have done, with even a bit of a revelation at a critical juncture about the creature–a very simple, basic revelation that took me pleasantly by surprise. Props as well for an FBI agent showing up to provide interesting connections to Jo’s backstory as well as a hint of how other law enforcement agencies deal with the supernatural.

Overall, this book rocked, and all the more so for providing an excellent leadin for Book 6. Five stars.

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Book Log #5: Sea of Suspicion, by Toni Anderson

Sea of Suspicion

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had a bit of a time getting into Sea of Suspicion, one of Carina Press’ romantic suspense titles. Toni Anderson did draw me in nicely with the setup: rugged coast of Scotland, marine biologist stumbling across a murder, investigating detective on a quest for vengeance and locked squarely on the biologist heroine’s boss as his primary suspect. By and large, it is a decent story. It’s just that various aspects of characterization never quite clicked in for me.

Part of this had to do with the obligatory Troubled Pasts for both the heroine and the hero. While I acknowledge that it’s a bit of a nice change of pace to see the hero as well as the heroine having to deal with sexual abuse in the past, that’s a particular plot point I’ve seen too much of, both in fiction and among people I know in real life. Which is about all I can say about that, really, and it has less to do with this particular book and way more with just my personal tastes as a reader.

More pertinent to the book was that at least for a good stretch in the beginning, I was actively disliking the hero. He pulls one stunt in particular at the heroine’s expense that made me cranky at him, and which was not entirely ameliorated by his owning up to it later.

I had better luck with liking the heroine as a character, even given my aforementioned weariness with sexual abuse as backstory. Plot-wise, the story’s decent, and to its credit, it did come together more strongly for me towards the end. Props too for Anderson doing a nice job keeping me from figuring out the actual killer until suitably close to the end. Three stars.