My email appears to be broken right now, do to some massive screwup by my hosting company. Since last night, DNS has been failing for some of my domains. I’ve been a Dreamhost customer for a long time, and I’ve defended them repeatedly. The bang for the buck factor is great. But geez this is annoying.

I’ve been on the other side of the equation. I’ve been responsible for keeping huge and complicated Internet sites up and running. I’ve had to deal with complex outages at inopportune times (is any time opportune for an outage?). So I have sympathy for them. But I also have very high standards for designing things to be reliable, and for resolving problems when they come up. A 12-hour plus outage is simply unacceptable.

If you need to reach me before this gets fixed, I send me an IM or a Facebook message or something. Or write to my work email address if you have it. Sorry :-(

Update: Things seem better now. Ugh.

If you have a website and you haven’t used Google Webmaster Central, and more specifically Webmaster Tools, you’re really missing out on some cool stuff. And I’m not just saying that because it’s one of the projects I work on ;-)

One of the things you’ll find in Webmaster Tools is a list of the most common search terms your website turns up for (not just the ones people have clicked on to get to your site). There are almost always a few “interesting” things in the list. My favorite of the moment for this site is “nude dress up games”. Huh? If you’re dressing up, how are you nude? And if you’re nude, can’t you think of any better games to play than dress up?

The great mysteries of life…

Michael White was my teacher for Improv 400, and he was undoubtedly one of the best teachers I’ve ever had for any subject. It was truly an awesome class. Michael is also a hypnotherapist, and he recently posted a podcast using hypnosis to help people overcome a fear of clowns. Even if you’re not afraid of clowns, it’s worth checking out!

(Via Creative Creativity.)

Awwww yeah! We’ve got our tickets and hotel reservation (tricky!) — we’re going to Nashville next summer for the CMA Music Festival! Neither of us have been to Nashville, so we’re both really excited.

Do any of you have any CMA Fest tips, or things we should see while we’re in Nashville?

I would apologize for the bad pun in the title of this post, but I think it may be so bad as to not even qualify as a pun.

After much complaining, hand wringing and web searching, I gave in and bought a ReadyNAS NV+. Since the party poopers discontinued the diskless version, I ordered the 1x500GB model, and separately ordered a couple more 500GB disks from NewEgg. If you’re interested in taking this route, you may want to hurry. There are signs that the 1x500 model has also been discontinued — it’s not shown on the Netgear site at all — but some are apparently available still.

With the diskless version out of the picture, it wasn’t quite as much of a slam dunk decision, but I think it’s still a reasonable value. Once I get it, set it up and figure out the rest of my new photo archiving workflow, I’ll report back.