Category Archive 'Blog Administration'
27 Aug 2024
Eight days after our satellite internet connection went down, Viasat got a technician out to the Central Pennsylvania farm to deal with the problem. We pay hundreds and hundreds per month for “business” level services and this is what support service is like.
But, don’t worry! Viasat will cancel charges for the days our connection was down. Of course, the service call results in a $200 extra charge.
For the benefit of commenters: Starlink is not available for my location. Our alternative is Hughesnet, which is not really any better.
This kind of thing, a vital system component wearing out and expiring, does happen every four or five years, and repair servics are always excruciatingly slow.
17 Dec 2022
My no-good wife brought COVID home from one of her choral groups and gave it to me. I’ve been sleeping a lot and feeling sorry for myself and took a vacation from blogging. My apologies.
27 Sep 2021
Viasat Exede satellite Internet went down Thursday.
Their service reps have no explanation and can provide no predicted time of restored service.
The outage is affecting customers over most of the country. Rumors claim a train derailed and set on fire an Exede facility somewhere in Texas or Washington state or Illinois or Canada, a cable was damaged and the authorities will not allow techs to enter to make repairs. Who knows?
What seems even more strange is the complete lack of media coverage.
11 Jul 2021
A sudden high wind brought down the top of an ancient hemlock next to our 1812 Central Pennsylvania log cabin.
No power, no water, no air conditioning in July, no Internet. Down in Virginia, we had a back-up generator, but outages are usually short in Pennsylvania and the farm was just a vacation place.
28 Mar 2021
It was windy. Trees came down, and we’ve been sitting with no power for a couple of days. You don’t realize how dependent on electrical power you are until you don’t have any.
Down in Virginia, we had a back-up generator. Our PA farm was always just a vacation place and, besides, power is usually very reliable and service restoration quick here in PA. Not so much this time.
06 Dec 2020
Temporarily Locked on Top.
About six months ago, it suddenly became the case that you had to do something every 90 days to update your SSL Certificate, or else anyone logging onto your web page got redirected to a warning that yours is an insecure site.
It took several occurrences before it dawned on my dim reptilian intelligence that this unhappy state of affairs was going to keep happening and steps needed to be taken to avoid it. When I looked into it, my hosting company explained that I could switch to a different hosting plan on a different server for a few bucks more per month.
Sure, I said, Let’s do that.
Well, they took their time, and moved NYM on Thanksgiving Day. Chaos ensued. Connecting to NYM commonly produced 103 — Bandwidth Exceeded errors, and trying to upload a post crashed WordPress.
It turned out that they offered me a plan with hardly any bandwidth, completely inadequate for NYM’s traffic. And changing servers resulted in several plugins acting up and causing everything to crash.
I used to get great support from Hostica, but this time I was left hanging with no responses. So I pulled the plug on Hostica.
I moved over to a new hosting company, which it turns out, amusingly, is in Lithuania. (I’m of Lithuanian descent, you see.)
Things are not entirely different. I’ve been discovering that, nowadays, these hosting companies all seem to expect to you go to their site and fiddle with the mechanics of it all yourself. Since the need arises once every five years or so, one’s personal familiarity with all this is lacking.
So… the migration has been done, and NYM’s new Name Server Address has finally propagated (It can take 48 hours). It is not crashing so far. And I set up SSL so you should not get warnings. The only problem is that I seem to have lost a couple of days recent postings.
More surprises may be in store, but I think the worst is over.
Sigh, I used to be hosted by this religious fanatic nerd in Texas. I could just phone Ed, and Ed would fix whatever. Unfortunately, somebody hired Ed for a real IT job and part of the deal included Ed giving up moonlighting as a hosting service.
UPDATE: I just found that I’ve got the blog from yesterday sitting on an open browser page, so now I can just, laboriously, reload all the missing postings.
29 Nov 2020
I had to get the NYM site moved to a different (higher-priced) server in order to cause the Security Certificate to be automatically updated every 90 days, so as to avoid warnings from your browers about this being an “insecure site.”
Like most moves, it produced some problems, and –of course!– all this naturally occurred over the Thanksgiving Holiday long weekend when hosting service support is thin on the ground.
Please be patient. All this will be resolved.
13 Nov 2020
The warning you see is not really valid.
All browsers now require an SSL (= “Secure Sockets Layer”) Security Certificate which, depending on your host’s system, may need to be renewed every three months.
I’m trying to get moved to an automatically renewing system.
16 Sep 2019
It doesn’t happen very often at all, but today Never Yet Melted’s host servers were down for quite a long time. Sooner or later, it happens to everyone. I’ve seen Instapundit off-line a couple of times.
My apologies.
22 Oct 2018
I have compiled all the comments on this web-site loading slowly below, so that potential technical support can have a handy reference.
My own observations:
I have no clue what the problem some people (and only some people) seem to be having could be.
I use Chrome for blogging and I look at the blog all the time in Chrome, and it loads normally for me. My wife finds no problem either.
I did reduce the number of posts on page one which should slightly speed things up.
I now intend to ask for technical advice.
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2018/10/09 at 5:51 pm:
Your website has become really, really slow. Last few days. So slow sometimes I just cancel the load and go somewhere else.
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2018/10/11 at 3:03 pm:
Thursday, 10/11, 3:00 p.m. EST: unusable. 1:16 (one minute, 16 seconds) for your page to load once the name resolution completed. Just as long to access this comment page. No problems with any other websites.
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2018/10/13 at 9:42 am:
It’s working well now! Much, much better.
I’ve been using both Chrome and Safari on a Mac – operating system and browsers all latest versions. Chrome has been flakey with High Sierra, but the slow load was only your site, until last night.
You can email me to discuss offline if you like, and I’m happy to provide feedback going forward.
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2018/10/13 at 5:55 pm:
I spoke too soon. Now, almost 6:00 p.m. Saturday, it’s back to 1:16 from clicking the comment link to the page load.
Something’s very wrong.
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2018/10/13 at 10:06 pm:
Update: right now it’s really, really slow on Chrome and Safari, but
speedy on Firefox.
Mac OS X 10.13.6 (High Sierra)
Chrome Version 69.0.3497.100 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Safari Version 12.0 (13606.2.11)
Firefox 62.0.3 (64-bit)
(I believe these are all latest versions)
I can’t explain it.
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2018/10/16 at 7:33 am:
I know, it’s weird. I tried it again just now, it seemingly NEVER loads on Safari, and takes forever on Chrome, but it’s speedy with Firefox. As I said, latest Mac OS, latest Chrome, latest Safari, latest Firefox. The browser status when it’s taking a long time is “Connecting….†It eventually connects, but ever page load to your blog takes as long.
I’d really like to know if it’s me, what it is!
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2018/10/16 at 12:24 pm:
On Chrome on my home desktop has been loading slowly for a week or two.
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2018/10/16 at 11:42 am:
Use Chrome . No issues .
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2018/10/16 at 5:23 pm:
on Safari it has stopped loading all together when I click my bookmark. But if I manually type in url it will load. On Chrome it loads very slowly but eventually does load.
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2018/10/16 at 5:59 pm:
Usually access using Android phone with Chrome. Has been exceeding slow to load the last couple weeks but is ok after it does.
Tried it with Brave which I recently installed. Handshake took a few seconds but loaded quickly. Never had an issue with Firefox on laptop.
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2018/10/16 at 6:50 pm:
It is just fine on Firefox but videos linked from facebook don’t even show on the page.
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2018/10/16 at 7:05 pm:
Chrome… about two weeks ago it started to go very slow. Takes about 30 seconds to open the home page. Clicking here just now to comment also took another 30 seconds.
But like the old catsup commercial… anticipation was worth it.
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2018/10/19 at 12:44 pm:
Loads like ye olde greased lightning.
16 Oct 2018
One regular readers is reporting that NYM is loading slowly for him on certain browser. “it seemingly NEVER loads on Safari, and takes forever on Chrome, but it’s speedy with Firefox.”
Is anybody else experiencing this problem?
10 Sep 2018
Hussar, enormous Taigan puppy, just about in my lap.
Dogs!
We have two: Uhlan, a 9-year-old Tazy (a breed of sighthound from Kazakhstan) and Hussar, a one-year-old Taigan (a breed of sighthound from Kyrgysztan, a member of the first litter born in North America). (I have friends who are into weird dogs.)
The tazy is significantly smaller, but smarter and a lot more feral. Uhlan has all the unspoiled-by-civilization-and-domestication wildness and complete lack of subordination that crazy sighthound fanatics particularly prize.
The taigan is huge, black, and goofy. He is a lummox with no sense whatsover of how much space he takes up and no regard for human property. He is fanatically playful, in the manner of a puppy, and he loves to fetch and retrieve dog toys.
The tazy is like the Dragon Smaug in The Hobbit. He considers all dog toys his and will collect them and then sit gloating over the pile of them.
Smaug’s greed recently reached a new peak. When he hears the impact of a toy I’ve thrown for the puppy, Smaug will deliberately come downstairs, confiscate the toy, and remove it to his hoard upstairs.
Last night, Karen and I were watching a movie, and the puppy wanted to play, so he brought over the flat, entirely disemboweled rag that was once some kind of stuffed animal. Karen and I were distracted by the movie, so Uhlan’s sudden arrival was overlooked. A violent dog tussle and spinning canine tornado erupted in front of us, which quickly took hold of the power cord of my brand-new $1500 laptop PC, yanking it right off the table and hurling it to the floor.
The new Lenovo survived, but the male end of the power cord was twisted and bent. Last night, I thought it still made an electrical connection, but I was wrong. That cord is as dead as Fogarty’s goat.
I ordered a replacement last night. $47.00 and change, discounted from Amazon. It’s due to arrive tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’m back on my older, slower machine.
If anybody is planning any medical experiments, I know where he can get a couple of dogs.
It is also monsooning here and satellite Internet is out a great deal. Blogging will be light.
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