I think David Pogue sums up what's wrong with online etiquette pretty well.

We've been offline for a long, long time. I don't know exactly when the problem started. Last month, St. Louis got rocked by a huge storm and we were without power for five days. When it came back, my web server didn't.

I restored from the last good backup I had, but unfortunately that was a couple of months old. So the last three months' worth of entries are gone. That wasn't a lot, but it's something.

I noticed yesterday that my site was painfully slow, and my server was thrashing like nobody's business. My access logs suggest that my site has been crawled incessantly by online casinos and other various forms of lowlife, and that it's been happening for some time.

Hopefully that's over now.

At around 9 PM last night, Southwestern Bell lost a data line. My DSL connection became sporadic and my telephone became so full of static as to be unusable for voice. Within an hour, I lost all use of my voice line. DSL would drop and come back occasionally.

They are aware of the problem and gave an ETA of 10 PM on Wednesday of clearing it up. The DSL has been reliable for a couple of hours now, but that's not really an indicator. We'll see what happens.

The site's been up and down, mostly down, the last two days. The reason is simple: my DSL connection has been mostly down the last two days.

Why, I don't know.

I've enabled Google ads on my site for all visitors. Previously, for the past three months or so, I had been displaying ads only when the site referrer was something outside of this site.

If you object to online advertising, you can easily log in to the site, go to your preferences, scroll to the bottom, and check all the boxes you want, leaving the Google Ads block unchecked. So long as you don't sign out before your next visit, the site will hold that preference the same way it holds your theme of choice. You can turn off other blocks as well, to make the page load faster or whatever.

I still haven't fixed the calendar (I'm a slacker) but I've got two other important things working. For those of you who use RDF/RSS, my feed is working (the link's in the lower right), and for those of you who use blo.gs to track your favorite blogs, I've got my blo.gs update working now too.

I think I vaguely recall Southwestern Bell was doing some maintenance this weekend. Sometimes my DSL connection survives interruptions and sometimes it doesn't. Today it didn't.

It's come to my attention that registrations aren't working for everyone. It appears that some mail servers don't like mail from my system. A peek at the mail headers explains why--I have to admit, it does look a bit suspicious. So if you've registered and never received confirmation e-mail, that's why.

I'm going to try to fix it this week. In the meantime, I need to go through and find the people who've registered but never logged in and contact them. I may be able to do this as soon as tonight. So please, bear with me and hang in there.

I'm pleased to unveil The Silicon Underground, Version 5.0. I'd still like to do some design work and a little more tweaking here and there, but now that we've reached the point where what we have now is better than anything we've had before, it's time to throw the switch.