I pay $10/month in order to have a static IP address for my Sprint DSL. The idea behind this is that I can host servers here at home, and the address will be constant, such that people going to websites (like this one, or, say, vafamilyvalues.org, my new site) will always be able to get through.
A static IP is kind of like having a static telephone number: your telephone number could hypothetically change every day or two, and people could just look your number up on-line, which would always be current, and they could always get through to you. But that would be a huge pain in the ass, so we have static telephone numbers. Those of you with a mobile phone that you don’t even know the phone number to, on the other hand, really wouldn’t care if that phone number changed. Likewise, I have a static IP for my Internet connection, because I have a couple of servers. Most people have a dynamic IP, because they don’t have severs — nobody’s calling them, as it were.
This morning, at 5:14am, Sprint assigned me a new IP address. This morning, Amber and I awoke to have no Internet connection. I spent a bit debugging before I concluded that the problem was Sprint. Amber, because she’s calmer than me in such situations, called Sprint, who took 10 minutes to conclude that we were using the wrong IP address. They had, it seemed, assigned us a new one, but never told us. So none of the websites work. No e-mail. No Internet connection.
Sprint gave us a new IP, two numbers up from the old one. But the DNS — the Internet telephone book — will take up to 24 hours to update and so, in the meantime, few people can get through to any of my websites.
I hate Sprint. I’m a life-long avowed despiser of Sprint, a result of their having been our local phone company here in Charlottesville, and so I’ve been stuck under their monopoly for many years. They’re the only broadband provider where we live — we’re just slightly out of range of Ntelos, sadly — so we don’t have a choice in the matter.
Anyhow, to those of you with mailing lists at lists.waldo.net, or those hoping to see vafamilyvalues.org, or whatever…sorry.
Hey Waldo — I had sent you an e-mail regarding the kitten, but in case your IP problems prevented you from getting it, the gist was this: My roommate and I are in love with the kitten. We are not allowed to have pets, but we feel we could easily hide it in our suite until this summer, when I would take it home with me.
However, if someone with a big house wants to adopt the kitten, it might be happier having more space, a yard, et cet. But if nobody else wants the kitten — don’t send it to the SPCA!! We think it is the cutest kitten we have ever seen.
Wait a minute! Don’t send it to the SPCA? Y’all don’t mind aborting fetuses for no reason other than not wanting to take responsibilty for your actions (save life threatening situations) Yet you desperately don’t want to kill the cat? Am I seeing this right?
Um. Brandon. I hardly know where to start. If it were just about anybody else, I’d ignore your comment, but you’re a nice guy.
Yall dont mind aborting fetuses for no reason
That’s a really horrible thing to say. I mean seriously terrible. Being pro-choice has nothing to do with being pro-death. If you favor the death penalty, that doesn’t mean that you “don’t mind murdering people who could be innocent.” If I (or C., above) am pro-choice, that means that I will not hold my personal morals to be superior to others’ freedoms. It means nothing more than that. For all that you know, both C. and I are ardently opposed to abortion, and would never have one (the obvious point of my being a male aside), but are unwilling to enforce our religiously-rooted viewpoint on others.
Yet you desperately dont want to kill the cat?
C. doesn’t want to see the cat killed, as is plain. Neither do I, but I’d rather leave it up to the SPCA than care for her myself. Those who support a woman’s life to choose believe that a fetus is not alive, at least up to a point — that point varies greatly between belief structures and levels of scientific knowledge. The cat, on the other hand, is alive.
It’s not baby vs. cat, although I’m sure that you enjoy thinking of it like that. It’s non living thing vs. living thing.
Glad this cat nonsence is dealt with!