My site (and my e-mail) was down for a couple of days. It caused me to think about a few things.

First of all, it made me really think about why I like having my own domian. When it was gone, I honestly felt disconnected. I had my net connection, and every other thing, but my site and my main e-mail was gone... and it was MINE! It sounds silly, but that was how a felt.

Besides that odd feeling, there are some very practical reasons why having one's own domain is a good thing. You have e-mail that you control with whatever name you want ( I can have up to 30 accounts based on '@maximumword.com', and for very little more I could have unlimited ones) along with access to all those accounts if I wish (great for families that have kids, isn't it?). And then there is the server space... not only do I have a site that I can say whatever I want to the world, but I can also store things that I can access anywhere in the world that I have net access.

I may just write up an article about it. I'll let you know if I do.

The other thing is the problem. My site was there, my server was working.. nothing really was broken! Then why couldn't you get to it? It is what is called a name server problem. You see, the whole internet is actually addressed with numbers. Yes, like phone numbers. So what happened was that my information got changed... so the information in the name server, the server that looks at the the URL that you type in the address bar of your browser and points it to the actual site, had bad information.

I could still get to it, but I would have to type in the actual number address. A real pain... think if you had to use longitude and laditude addresses instead of street addresses to find anybody!

Poor speller busted for misspelled bomb threat

Much of my family is involved in education... and now we have a clear sign why that is so important. This guy so badly spelled a bomb threat note on a fake bomb ("The bom (b-o-m) will bloe (b-l-o-e) if you touch it.") that everybody knew who it was.

See? Had this person had a proper education, he cold have wrote a bomb note with no misspellings and would have gotten away with it!

Marvin The Martian and Daffy Duck as Duck Dodgers Prepare for Upcoming NASA Missions to Mars | SpaceRef - Your Space Reference

The headline says it all. The patches are shown on the page. Worth seeing.

Wired News: Probing the Power of Corked Bats

In the wake of the current Sammy Sosa story, here is an article about how maybe corking a bat isn't as good as one might think.

Girls Teach Teen Cyber Gab to FBI Agents (washingtonpost.com)

It's a very serious subject, but it also had me giggling. Teen age girls teach FBI agents to chat online like... well, teen age girls.

"The girls were recruited after one of their fathers, an agent involved in the pedophile investigations, watched her instant messaging a friend and couldn't understand what she was typing. He realized that FBI training wasn't enough."

Yes, indeed... for being a teen age girl, FBI training wasn't enough.

The Eric Eldred Act
OK, I tend not to get political here, but I thought I'd add this. It's about copy right laws and how we are losing works in Public Domain. Why should you care? Well... read the site. But consider Disney, a company that fought hard to retain the current law that extends copy right by decades. Despite this, you have to wonder where they would be if the law was this way before. After all, what are Disney's big hits? The Little Meremad, Snow White, and others... all works they got from the public domain and remade into new classics. Where would those works be if some company still owned those works, decades after the actual author was gone?

XE.com - The Universal Currency Converter ®

Need to convert money, or see a story about money in a forien coin and wonder how much it really is (sort of like the story below this one)? Here is where you go. Type an amount, select the money it's in, then select the money you want to convert it to and hit a button... it's that easy. And it's based on live data feeds for their converstion values.

KEANU REEVES GIVES £50 MILLION TO UNSUNG HEROES OF 'THE MATRIX'

Keanu Reeves, the star of the recent blockbuster "Matrix: Reloaded", gave millions to the Special Effects team. Very nice... they are the ones that made him look so good, after all.

OK, I'm adding something new... comments. Just like everything else here, it's mainly as a learning thing, seeing how things work.

Do you see the 'comments(0)' thing on the end of this post? Well, if you click on it a pop up window .... well, it pops up. In that window you can leave a comment on the post. "Gee, that was the dumbest website I ever went to... why did you post it?" or "Son, you haven't called me in a week. You have time to post web game sites and pictures of giant squids, but you don't have time to call your Mother?". Whatever you want.

Since I only have a few viewers (Mom, and my room mate when I force her to check my page out), I doubt I'll get many comments. But It was interesting to set it up, even fairly easy (and free!).

For anybody interested, the site that gave me this interesting feature is here.

Gizmodo : The Gadgets Weblog

For those that like gagets, this is the place. It covers new gagets as news of them hit the net. Even non-geeks can enjoy it, as it's keeps the entries as simple summeries, with a link if you want to go deeper.