I woke up and screamed. I was jolted awake by a dream I cannot remember. The dream is not what made me scream. It was the giant Woookie sitting right in front of my face. Bigass Wookie, right there.
I was up early today. I sleep well yet I cannot sleep. I mean, when I sleep it’s good these days, but I’m finding it harder to stay there. When I am tired like this I feel melancholy, moreso than usual. I feel like I’m on some kind of tightrope. Funny, I just remembered the first subdomain I ever assigned to sorabji.com with tightrope.sorabji.com. That’s when I hosted my site at Digiweb. A hosting company by that name still exists but I’m not certain it’s the same entity. Digiweb today is based in Ireland, but I seem to recall it being in the U.S. Nothing to fret about.
When I used to travel more I collected IP addresses of the dialup connections I made through Netcom. Dialup access usually assigned you a dynamic IP address which, when fully resolved, would reveal something about where you were. I don’t think I saved those addresses anywhere where I could emulate their format now but an address from a Daytona Beach motel room might look like
rrcs-202-115-213-94.dbfl.netcom.com
with “dbfl” the clue to my location. Or a dialin from Tampa might like
rrcs-202-115-213-94.tpafl.netcom.com
These days my home IP address changes once in a while, without warning. This briefly intrudes on my ability to post content here or elsewhere, since access to the publishing system is usually limited to my home address. Dynamic IPs are still assigned to mobile devices, changing with your movements. Those addresses vary considerably in their ability to reveal your location, but many of them can reveal what city you are in if you plug the address into one of those IP address location finder sites, or if you have such a function on your own machine. I use a lightweight IP-to-location Perl script once in a while to see if I can tell where certain web traffic is coming from. That’s how I know when CityBridge, Intersection, and their ilk are reading my LinkNYC postings. In the case of corporate IP addresses I think the higher-ups with limited technical background would be surprised how much they reveal about themselves simply by accessing a webpage. In the case of CityBridge I’ve been able to determine who was reading a webpage of mine right down to the individual. Similarly, years ago a woman who was interested in me would access my websites throughout the day, unaware that I could see her name fly by in my access_logs. Her fully qualified address looked something like
mary-jones.202-67-213-17.scitechlab.nyu.edu
I never said anything, and we never went anywhere.
I remember a static address I had for a couple of years: sorabji.dialup.access.net. I think I remember it because it was part of a story I posted to a BBS recounting an interesting encounter on IRC. The rhythm of “dialup.access.net” integrated perfectly with the subject matter, especially since I posted the story to a BBS that considered itself a rival of the access.net provider.
A Google search of sorabji.dialup.access.net today reveals that in 1994 I accessed some text files at the altexxanet.org gopher server, and that after the Oklahoma City bombing I joined the #oklahoma channel on IRC. I seem to remember it being written about somewhere how the use of IRC to keep up with breaking news about that bombing was considered something of a watershed moment in the evolution of the Internet.
I could ramble like this all day but I need air and my chest is tightening.
Wookie!
