Juuuuuuust spiffy.

1040 electronic filing started up yesterday, and all seemed well.

Got a high priority email this morning, ELF has gone sideways everywhere, can I please fix it, they're taking a zillion calls in the support center.

I couldn't connect to the VPN. I emailled back saying so, and I might have to drive in to fix it.

Then they found the problem. Someone forgot to renew our domain.

Boned.

The on-site network team is mostly gone through attrition, we're not allowed to hire replacements as people leave, since the mothership wants us to not have anyone but cable pullers around anymore, and wants us to use their centralized support over in Eagan, MN.

I bet we transferred control of domains over to Eagan recently. I just bet. We didn't have these problems when our own people were in control. Maybe someone forgot to tell them that yes, we still need that legacy domain, even though we're supposed to have been sucked up into our new parent company's domain as a subset.

Nifty, legal torrent

About a year ago, I discovered the website of a guy who is digitizing old, out of print and out of copyright (probably) 78s. I've been reluctant to just go nuts on his site because I don't want to destroy his bandwidth, but I've grabbed a few things.

I went up there yesterday for the first time in months and found that someone has posted everything from his site on a torrent, so I jumped right in. If you want to also, here's the page:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1697139

The captures are raw, no digital cleanup has been done. If you're into archival music, really old country, blues, any style popular back through the 30s or so, there's good stuff a-plenty in there.