Yesterday my email and web site disappeared from the 'net. Rather than take that as a sign that I should relax, lift my head up from the screen, breathe deep, and enjoy local humanity, I struggled hard to recover my information saturation and processing facility.

Bud.com is a domain I registered in 1994. I use it for email, and I host a casual group web share there. The DNS - the location information about that computer, was stored on a server in Los Angeles I have no access to. That LA server game address information for a Cyborganic machine that will no longer be on the net in a few days. That Cyborganic computer pushed Bud.com email delivery information to a third computer, where I check my email and edit my web site. As it turns out, Bud.com is hosted on a fourth computer.

Just sorting out the chain of command between computers on the internet was a reimmersion education for me in the specific architecture of the system we use to meet each other. Kind Brendan on the phone to me helped bolster my confidence. And finally I changed my own TinyDNS and so rejoined the electronic conversation once more.

A side effect? The half-dozen aliases I have had pointing at my email inbox for seven years or more are gone. link@justin.org, speak@justin.org, biz@justin.org, html@justin.org, sex@justin.org, advice@justin.org, cause@justin.org - these are email aliases I had set up to sort my mail back in 1996, and haven't used effectively since 1999. These days they were mostly dumping daily spamloads into my correspondence.

So this morning, when I came back, to see if the Internet knew my new address, I had massively reduced my spam. For a day. Anyhow, here's my email address.