Daynote mail 1999 week 13

Daynote mail: Week of 29 March - 4 April, 1999

Daynote mail and replies -- Week 13

* Link to: last modified at 22:50 GMT+2, on 04.04.1999

Any quoted mail from reader feedback ends up here. This tends to reflect something of the ongoing discussions between myself and readers (and other web-daynote maintainers), provide tips, ask for help, and just be plain fun.

The sidebar "Daynotes"-link, beside each weekday, links to the corresponding day in the daynote file. The reverse linkage is also provided on the daynotes.

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Quoted mail may be shortened and is usually based on my reply quotes. There may be some minor overlap between what's on the daynote page and what is given here in order to give correct context.

(BTW, week numbering is according to the Swedish calendar, which this year started January in week 53. "Current" weekday is of course based on GMT+1.)

Monday 29.03

Something from John Berlyne, concerning my list of Science Fiction authors:

Hi,
I don't know if you are familair with my own Tim Powers site, but I was wondering if you would consider placing a link to it on your own page.
The URL is :-
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~jberlyne/powers/works.htm
...and I would be interested to hear any comments you may have.
I look forward to hearing from you.

There are quite a few sites devoted to Tim Powers, somewhat diverse in terms of content. I have ended up posting a number, rather haphazardly, on the page, and included the above. I should try and do this sort of thing more systematically, but my initial thought had been to only include the author's own website, where applicable, otherwise perhaps one main, stable unofficial site with good content and further links. Things are seldom that neat in practice, and there are occasions such as with Tim Powers where there are several unofficial sites that deserve mention.

Tuesday 30.03

(nothing of import)

Wednesday 31.03

Bob Thompson wrote apropos the book news:

Congratulations. I knew you guys would do it.
I just got mail from a reader today, saying that he's closing a book contract with O'Reilly as well. Counting Pournelle, that means I've had a hand in bringing four new authors to O'Reilly. I'm going to start asking them for a finder's fee.
You deserve double thanks in my case, since you so warmly recommended me to David in the first place, which started the whole process. This is just great!

(David L Rogelberg, our agent at Studio B.)

Thursday 01.04

(nosigmail) :)

Friday 02.04

I commented on Bob Thompson's posting of his problem lately about no access to his site at pair Networks:

"The tracerts from both ISPs I dialed into showed that the trace was dying at the final AlterNet host before reaching pair, so it appears that AlterNet was having some kind of problem."
Some time ago I was doing tracert to various places in my research on good hosts, and later monitoring my own sites. When general traffic levels went up, Alternet nodes started going above 1000 ms and timing out. From where I sit, most routings to US sites seem to pass through between 3 and 6 AlterNet nodes located throught the US, and most showed problematic behaviour at one time or another.

He answered:

I'm sure you're right, although I've never experienced this sort of problem before. pair Networks tech support tells me that they weren't experiencing any problems, and I believe them. What I don't understand is why my traffic to pair wasn't routed around the blockage at AlterNet. I mean, we're talking a major backbone segment here. I can understand why there might be problems for a few minutes, but my link to pair was cut for hours. I'd think AlterNet would have routed around the problem much faster than they did.

Maybe it is too major... I ran a couple of tracert's this evening (10 PM GMT+2), and the results varied from normal to several total time-outs at various alternet nodes (there are typically 10 alternet hops showing this evening to both my sites and to Bob's, as seen from here). Usually, these time-outs are transient, and hours of downtime does seem excessive to say the least for a backbone network.

Saturday 03.04

(nothing to post)

Sunday 04.04

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