Double Outage.

 Modern technology is so useful, but so annoying if it doesn't work.  I woke up this morning to find the Wifi in my apartment had quit.  It took until this afternoon for the techs to come along to fix it.  So no Internet.  On top of that I found out this afternoon that my cell phone wasn't working, and of course I couldn't check my account online because I had no Internet access.  I eventually tried a reboot, which has worked.  I guess it decided not to play nice because I was in Alberta on Tuesday and Wednesday, and disconnected at some point.  And if you don't use your phone, you don't know you're not getting calls because it's not working.

It's Slow.

Over the last 24 hours certain Internet sites have been sluggish for me, or haven't come up at all.  Can I blame the Tea Party for that, since US government servers might not be getting proper attention, resulting in problems?  Or should I blame the rush to sign up for Obamacare, which has apparently caused problems for the US government website involved?  Or is it actually Grand Theft Auto V's fault, since the online gaming portion of the game went active yesterday, and was expected to suck up a lot of bandwidth? 

I know it's not my fault, so I have to blame someone, right?

A New Domain.

A thought just came to mind.  Perhaps it's time for the online gambling industry to push for its own Internet domain.  Specifically it would be .bet.  Although for all I know being close to .net might cause problems. 

Naughtyspace.

In recent years it was proposed that a top level domain be created for online pornographic sites, .xxx. The proposal has been rejected by ICANN, the organisation in charge of managing such things. A typing error last night made me think of a couple of possible top level domains for people of certain sexual persuasions, .dom and .sub, but if .xxx can't get approval I doubt these would either. I suppose there's also the question of whether .sub would get a lot of use. Would "masters" allow their "slaves" to have .sub websites, e-mail address and so on?

Goodbye SFN.

I received an e-mail today announcing that the Saskatoon Free-Net will cease its e-mail service on December 31st and will shut down all remaning online activities by June 1st of next year. Frankly I'm surprised the SFN stayed active this long. The ever increasing number of Canadians with things like high speed internet service, free e-mail sites with gigantic caches of memory per user, and the growth of blogging made the SFN pretty much obsolete. It had become little more than an e-mail hosting service in recent years, and presumably has seen less and less traffic as fewer and fewer people made financial contributions. But I'm sure many Saskatonians will be a bit sad to see it go as it was their first access to the Internet. It certainly was for me. The only good thing about it fading away is that a bunch of losers who have my SFN e-mail address in their spam lists will get it all bounced back at them for a while.

The Future of the Saskatoon Free-Net.

This evening I received a message in my e-mail about the upcoming general meeting for the Saskatoon Free-Net. The obvious question of course is if the organisation has much of a future, which will be discussed at the meeting. It currently serves primarily as an e-mail service while hosting a few web pages. However taking a look at some of them this evening it's obvious that some are no longer updated, while others merely point to the current pages of whoever ran them. Even the SFN homepage itself has sections that obviously haven't been updated in a good while. It's hard to say what value the service continues to have in an era of easily accessible free e-mail services. I know my continued use of the SFN for e-mail is as much inertia as anything else, and I would guess it's the same for other users. Funnily enough I found my old SFN profile page is still up. Not that I can actually do anything to it, but it's still there.

If you're interested the meeting will be held December 18th in the Meeting Room of Rusty McDonald Library in the Lawson Civic Centre, starting at 7 pm.