Last night’s biggest move yet, of sorabji.com, went with many hitches. Forgot that this .MOBI site was still located at that domain name, thought of it as .MOBI and not .COM. Fixed that but now I’m not sure this email will go where I intend. DNS is still doing its thing and traffic is going half to the old server and half to the new.
It’s concerning some of the stuff I’m seeing with this move. Some domains have still not moved even though they are all on the same DNS. I cannot access sorabji.com from FiOS at home but it appears from network diagnostics that pretty much anyone else in the world can — hah, as if anyone in the world gives a fuck.
Now I find I cannot SSH into the new box from T-Mobile hotspot on my phone, either at the domain name or IP address. That’s a bad thing if it’s somehow terminal. Get it? Terminal? Ho ho ho…
I am sitting at a bar. Whoop. I came in only because it is mostly empty. It’s nice to be around people. The barista at the coffee shop I mentioned the other day… I don’t know what but there is something off about him. I sensed it immediately the first moment I entered the place but saw no harm in carrying on conversation. I’ve been there 3 times now but might either space out my visits by a week or so or just give up on the place. The shop is so tiny that it’s a little awkward to not engage in casual conversation, and he seems like he wants to talk. He’s not gay, if his casual reference to an ex-gf is any indication, though if he’s bi it wouldn’t surprise me. He made frequent reference to his writing pursuits, referring to my own such activities at the coffee shop. There are time when I wonder, given my public past, if people I meet do not already know who I am. I am not flattering myself with that hypothetical, as I’ve had many memorable instances of a conversation with someone I’d never met before revealing that they knew of my receipts or that payphone thing but didn’t want to say anything at first. A friend from this neighborhood, in our first conversation, asked me “Have you ever heard of a website called ‘The Payphone Project’?” It was hilarious because I swear I did nothing to introduce the subject of payphones or even telephones into the conversation. Another time a woman and I had been talking quite animatedly for a while when she suddenly became very coy. She was like “I have to tell you something… I love your receipts.” She also added that her 20-something daughter was obsessed with them. I remained friends with her but not so much her daughter, who introduced herself to me by mentioning within 3 sentences that she hated all men and thought we were all a bunch of fucking idiots. Ah, youth.
Anyway the barista, given his apparent background in web site development and such, seems as likely as anyone to possibly recognize me. That is the sense I got the first time I walked into the place, that he was trying not to tell me something.
Speaking of writing I’ve been irritable about hearing from a woman who I’ve known at various levels of intimacy for about 20 years. I was surprised as hell to hear from her … I guess it was a couple of months ago. I thought sure she had written me off as a friend, which is not to say that I gave the matter a lot of thought.
What’s making me irritable is how after those ~20 of sometimes madly intimate encounters I find that I have no idea who this woman is. She publishes poetry and fiction under a nom de plume, she has possibly been lying to me all this time about her real name and age, and who knows what other vagaries of her diurnal existence she has skillfully skated around telling me. And it’s not just her. There’s a dude I’ve known for about the same number of years who, like her, ignores or somehow waves off almost any direct question about his livelihood or ambitions. He e-mailed me last week, making him one of the handful of people who at least tried to maintain connection since I quit Facebook, and that’s cool of him, but I have so far not responded. I don’t appreciate this sense that I don’t deserve or have not earned the right to know certain things.
It is impossible to really know a person. If I am irritable about these and other individuals opaque existences it is because I maintain an admittedly naive notion that such knowledge comes with years. But years pass like strangers. No, they pass like minutes.
The song “I’m Your Venus” is playing here. My sister said that the first time she heard it she thought the singer was saying “I’m Your Penis”. As the song plays I find that I hear “penis” instead of “venus” when I am not altogether listening to the song.
I was once on an airplane where, for whatever reason, (perhaps excess of inventory?) the flight attendants simply buried us in bags of peanuts. You expect this foodstuff on most flights but this time it was like every 20 minutes there would be another helping of 2 or 3 bags of peanuts. The flight landed and as the passengers filed off an older gentleman yelled “NICE PEANUTS!” Everybody on the plane turned to look in the direction of this individual, then turned away and chuckled. Some even giggled. Everyone thought he had shouted “NICE PENIS!” and that was why they turned to look and see.
The move to the new server in Canada has been kind of epic, though only for me. No one on the click end of the equation should care, as the change was transparent to them. I might have lost emails from overnight or earlier today. It took me a while to grasp the details of pointing email MX records to my box without using my own DNS. It’s a lot easier with your own DNS server but, as it took me a few days to understand, running your own DNS server isn’t really something you want to do at this data center.
