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If you can read this, don’t worry

I just received the notice below from my Web hosting service. If you’re reading this, then you’re unaffected, and you don’t care. If you aren’t reading this you should be worried!

Connectivity Between Cogent (Our Bandwidth provider) and Sprint

If you are having issues connecting to your website, or any other website hosted by IPOWER, this alert will provide some information to you.

Yesterday, 30th October, 2008, a press release was put out notifying the industry that Sprint-Nextel had severed its internet connection to Cogent (the provider of bandwidth for IPOWER), resulting in the inability of Sprint-Nextel’s customers to connect to any website that gains bandwidth from Cogent.

As our datacenters utilize Cogent to provide bandwidth, unfortunately, our customers are affected.

We’ve been in contact with our provider, who says they are attempting to work with Sprint to resolve this issue.

Our Network Operations team has begun investigating a way to get around this block, to get our customers back viewing their websites. However, it is uncertain at this time, if that will be possible.

For more details on what happened, and why, the press release can be found here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=cogent+sprint&btnG=Search+News

We appreciate your patience while we try to resolve this. While we would love to assist you, there’s little to nothing we can do in this situation, aside from relay the message to our provider that our customers are having issues. Please remain patient, and we will provide more information when it becomes available.
- 10/31/08 at 10:11 ET

Add comment October 31st, 2008

Smoother, milder Obama?

I had a funny thought while driving in today from PT (physical therapy — I love PT!), about Obama. Pundits — the ones who like him — have commented on his steady nerves and his rich sounding voice. Both of these characteristics were, in the past, promoted as benefits of smoking. I’m thinking of Nat King Cole, who was a heavy smoker. In my radio days I knew that announcers were encouraged to start smoking because of the effect it had of lowering their voice.

I’d heard some months ago that Obama was trying to quit smoking. If Obama is still smoking cigarettes, I can’t imagine he would be able to quit once he’s dealing with the demands of being President. If Obama isn’t already feeling the debilitating effects of smoking, he will as he gets into his fifties, whether it be shortness of breath or a morning cough.

8 comments October 31st, 2008