Anson the Gnome

I've had my vanity domain, idempot.net, for a pretty long time (I know plenty of people who have had vanity domains for longer, but 2002 was about when I realized I needed an email address that lasted longer than any single employer). I don't remember how exactly it started, except with the observation that you could make some puns with '.net' and words like 'omnipotent.' Of course omnipot.net was taken, and I didn't really want impot.net... but I was familiar with another 'potent' - 'idempotent' - from both the pure mathematical meaning, and the C programming idiom.

Since idempotency is a form of uniqueness, it inspired the further pun of notunique@mac.com - the only .Mac user who is notunique. Then Apple started charging for mac.com addresses, and I was unemployed around the time a renewal fee was due, so I gave up on that pun, and started using idempot.net consistently. I liked it better anyway: it is unique, it's punny, and it's geeky.

On the downside, t's hard to pronounce. Not as bad as some, but not as thoroughly in the zeitgeist, either. Personal business cards have helped, but it's still a pain some of the time: if I'm giving my email address over the phone, if I've run out of cards (as happens late in the night at conferences), or if someone simply transcribes it incorrectly.

So now, to fix those problems in the future, I've registered easytopronounce.com. I don't know what, exactly, I'm going to do with the domain, but in the short term it'll just point here.

The data center my web server resides in moved recently; I - and everyone I share my rack with - had to move our equipment some time between the beginning and end of this month. So that happened today, and I'm sorry for the downtime (to anyone that noticed) but it's stuff like this that, honestly, keeps me wanting to run my own server.

I remember once at NCsoft something similar happened; I don't remember (and may not have ever known) the "why" but data centers changed; I just noticed because... wow, all those sysadmins and network admins and other operational staff sure seemed tired and cranky. But as I recall, it didn't actually translate to significant game down time - certainly not the 8 or so hours this site had today (to be clear, everything in the rack was being moved at once - I didn't do such a terrible job that it took me 8 hours to move one 2U system across town).

That's something I should keep in mind, in my opinion. Can the systems I develop be easily migrated if they have to be? Not just for the (generally rare) circumstance of the entire data center moving, or contracts changing, but even the day-to-day of machine failure.

At nearly midnight, having been home for about 15 minutes, I'm certainly not of the right mindset to make a list of proper steps or describe an architecture or any such thing; but I can at least try to remember this feeling later, because I don't really wish it on anyone. :-)

There's going to be a hopefully-brief outage later tonight while I update the system to OpenBSD 4.5.

EDIT: done. Aside from dovecot not gracefully upgrading, everything was fine.