Relieved

When I got home on Thursday night, I called RoadRunner to see if they could help me figure out why my domain had resolved everywhere in the world except at my house. I guess I should have known better. I spent about two hours on the phone with various support personnel. The first one I got understood what the problem was -- the local RR office needed to flush the cache on the server -- but he couldn't do anything about it, he just had to pass me off to the local tech support people.

But they insisted that wasn't the problem, that it had to be something specific to my computer, because they were able to see the site from the office. I asked, "So there's just one domain name server for this area?" and he said no, that there was more than one, but he was sure that wasn't the problem.

At the end, I was getting really tired, and the guy was reading me stuff out of a Macintosh manual. He was asking me to do stuff that was scaring me (creating root access and using the terminal program, stuff that I just wasn't comfortable with, especially while holding the phone between my ear and my shoulder, thus not totally focused on what I was doing). I finally said, "hey, thank you for all your help, I'll just keep messing around with it, I've got a book here, too," and got off the phone.

The problem was that I really knew what the problem was, but wasn't 100% sure enough to argue about it. When I got in to work the next day, I was telling Cello about it, and he said he had never heard of a Mac holding on to DNS, that it had to be in the RR office, and he suggested staying completely off the internet over the weekend, not hitting my site, not checking email, nothing, and see if giving it a rest would allow the old IP to drop off.

So I checked my email when I got home, and then didn't touch it again for about twenty-four hours; there was no way that I was going to be able not to check for the entire weekend. But when I got back online Saturday night, it had fully resolved, and I was hitting the new site and getting email from the new server.

Spam started flooding in. It was such a relief! Obviously, spam disgusts me, and of course I'd rather not have it. But if it's a choice between having no mail at all, or having spam mixed with a few real emails, I'll take the spam. I have to spend a lot of time weeding out the good stuff, but it's a relief not worrying about what I might have missed.

The other big computer thing has been The Sims. I went to CompUSA on Saturday to get a new Flash card reader for my digital camera -- the one I had wouldn't work with OS X -- and saw that there was a rebate on the two Sims expansion packs I didn't have -- "Superstar" and "Makin' Magic." I'd heard that "Superstar" was buggy, and I wasn't even really sure I wanted to play it, but I thought I probably ought to go ahead and get them, since the rebate was about 30%.

Then, I don't know, I can't remember exactly what happened, I think I had imported a bunch of new stuff, and every time I tried to play it, all my houses would be gone. I knew they weren't really gone, but they weren't showing up in the game, I'd just get a completely blank neighborhood.

I kept deleting stuff and trying again, but wasn't having any luck, and it was taking forever to start up, so I finally bit the bullet and uninstalled everything and started over from scratch. This time I left out a few packs, only installing the original game, "Livin' Large," "Hot Date," "Unleashed," and "Makin' Magic." I left out "House Party" and "Vacation." I can always uninstall and reinstall again sometime if I want to--I'm getting to be quite the expert at that.