There's also a trapped feeling to it, reminiscent of the effects of the weapon in Jody Scott's Passing for Human that (horrors) traps a god in a single, mortal, body.

A couple of times over the past few years, I attended to medical parental emergencies away from home without a laptop in tow; both times, after about a week of non-access, I got on the web and suddenly felt like my physical extent was expanding away from my body, a feeling I had only achieved before with chemical assistance (and that only once). I was certainly primed for the effect by sleep deprivation and stress, but still it was a scary indication of how used I've got to the sensation of pseudo-alocality associated with surfing.

in a command window, you can type

nslookup www.frelledup.com

[substitute the name of the site that's not working] and see if you get an answer. If it says "not found" anywhere in there, you may have a problem.

ipconfig /all

Will let you see the ip address(es) of your dns server(s). If there's nothing listed for DNS, that's also potentially a problem. You should be able to call your provider, in that case, and tell them you are having a DNS problem, and skip all the IE hooey.

Makes one shudder to recall, doesn't it? :}

Signed,
Net.Addict

The description of the desolation of being bound in a finite, mortal body that always gets me is from Vernor Vinge's "True Names", as Mr. Slippery voluntarily shuts down the access that allowed him to use more than half of the entire worldnet to become a being capable of waging war among gods. In some ways losing high-speed access now is worse though; because you can remember precisely what you did when you had the access, you just can't do it anymore. Expand the human mind with the computation ability of software agents and highbandwidth sensory connections and you can do things whose very nature you might no be able to remember or understand without them.

Another possible solution to bad DNS mojo is to use one of the proxy solutions in the "Surviving IT Lockout" sidelights. Get to the proxy URL with an IP address, and let the proxy's favorite DNS server find your other addresses.

4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.4, 4.2.2.5, 4.2.2.6

They should work from any ISP -- assuming, that is, that you can send and receive UDP packets at all.

And to think, most of us lived comfortably for decades without any net.access at all.

In my case, I wasn't that comfortable.

As soon as I heard about the Net, I became jealous of those who had access.

I hope you're holding out all right; if you're used to instant access, not having it feels like...well, I hope I'll never be able to confirm this, but it feels like what I'd imagine mild aphasia would feel.

There's also a trapped feeling to it, reminiscent of the effects of the weapon in Jody Scott's Passing for Human that (horrors) traps a god in a single, mortal, body.

A milder form of this is the twitch I get, in a restaurant or tavern, when the sudden urge to know something comes over me and Google is nowhere within reach.

On the other hand, I have a pal who googles at the table, wirelessly, and it seems vaguely impolite.

Now, if only I could get rid of that little facial tic I've developed as a result . . .

Speak for yourself. :) I was on the net well before my life finished its second decade.

Having spent a month offline at home, online only at the office, I have tremendous sympathy.

In times of strife, we must take refuge in poetryversification. Therefore:

I have unplugged
the tubes
that connected
your computer

and which
you were probably
using
for your online life

Forgive me
I am Time Warner
so corporate
and so cold

'O, Patrick! Leave these frivolous demands,
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul'

?

I'll continue to file it under "I might not have hallucinated the whole thing. Maybe."

Dave "dialup was good enough fer Jesus" DeLaney

What is known about those nameservers? (4.2.2.1, 4.2.2.2, 4.2.2.3, 4.2.2.4, 4.2.2.5, 4.2.2.6 ) I keep seeing places where people recommend them, but who runs them?

E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops", 1909, features someone anxious about data withdrawal when going off-line for a few minutes from a network bearing resemblance to Twitter, YouTube, and the blogosphere in general.

The First Law of Computer Science (as I learned it when studying for my CS degree) is The probability of computer failure increases as a project deadline nears, reaching 1 on the day the project is due.

Back when I was doing the same, we learned it as a more specific rule, substituting "your class account running out of funny money" for simple computer failure. Out in the Real World, actual computer failure was almost a relief.

I probably shouldn't mention the corollary having to do with printers that I derived in (non-CS) grad school.

And for most of that time I felt like a sighted man in the kingdom of the blind. I have a vivid memory when as a young child I drew a picture of my house of the future, and I put a computer in the basement that would connect to all the other computers. And my parents really couldn't understand why. Not that my explanation that computers can do anything, and they're really cool, and why wouldn't you want one in your basement, really made sense back then (early 70's).

I do remember students begging professors for more money in their class accounts at the end of the term. At UMich we could even have our own personal accounts funded with our own (real) money. This came in very handy sometimes.

Nothing said so far in the thread specifically points to DNS server failure as a connectivity culprit, but there's a pretty simple test for this. If, for instance, you enter www.google.com and the web browser says the website can't be found, then enter http://74.125.19.103 instead. If the Google site magically appears, you know that you have a problem with DNS servers. Similarly, you can substitute the IP address for the name of any known site (say www.scalzi.com ==> http://82.165.131.129 )

As Patrick obviously already knows, Traceroute is your friend. A more likely explanation for failed connectivity is that there's a pipe broken somewhere between Time Warner and other carriers or that something's wrong in their internal server farm or their physical house-to-house cable connections. Traceroute might, at least, show where the break in connectivity occurs. Does Time Warner manage all the traffic in Brooklyn and Manhattan? If not, you might get external validation by taking a laptop to a wireless coffeehouse connected through someone else and trying to traceroute into your home IP. (This might be an interesting exercise, anyway. But it's one that you would think Time Warner's own staff would already have performed.)

Those public nameservers (the last time I could check) belong to Verizon or Level3 (tier 1). If the latter, they could possibly date back to BBN. More likely would be GTE Internet, which Verizon bought some time back -- the domain for these servers is gtei.net.

During the late '90s BBN was bought by GTE and merged with GTE Internet, after which Bell Atlantic merged with (but actually bought up) GTE to become Verizon, after which GTE Internet was spun off as Genuity, which then went bankrupt and was bought by Level 3. (My ISP was a connectivity and bandwidth customer of both GTE and BBN during various portions of these travails, which is why I remember.) Curiously, Level 3 has not yet gone bankrupt or been bought by anyone.

Despite these ordeals, some cadre of the original BBN folks seem to have maintained a few of their traditional public services. Thus I believe every one of the above theories about those DNS servers happens to be correct, and then some. (UUNet had some similar public DNS servers at one time, but I think they're long gone, along with AS 4.)

BTW, Time Warner is the cable TV provider for most of NYC, so they also provide broadband for a good chuck of the city also. When I signed up for cable internet I had the choice of AOL, Earthlink or Road Runner as my "provider". I chose Road Runner because at that time it didn't carry an extra charge beyond the broadband service itself.

It's not a DNS problem. It's also not our crapola Linksys wireless router, although its intermittent failure compounds the complication of diagnosing the TWC problem.

Anyway, the intertubes flow right now, so mmmmmmmm.

I've just finished Charlie Stross' The Atrocity Archives, so I'm already in that mode. I saw an orphaned glove on my windowsill and immediately thought of a Hand of Glory...

Don't they know that when I buy a book I never read it because I have to read the books I have out from the library first?