Hi everybody,

Sorry I'm behind, but I just got back from out of town and the server was down for several days and I'm way behind. Short answer, it's Heather and John in the bottom two, and Heather goes home. I don't feel bad to see her go, though, when she busts out a written farewell speech that is just painfully awkward. She blames Carrie Ann for them leaving ("She gave us a 7, we knew we wouldn't come back from that"), and then starts rambling about the makeup ladies in the back, and eventually I just gave up.

Next week should be John, by all rights, or possibly Billy Ray. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Ian drop down there as well since he's not getting any love from the judges (they even said, "Watch Billy Ray") and he doesn't have the sort of audience support the other two do.

You know that Duane is out of town when his blog is down for two days and he isn't on IM so that you can yell at him about it.

I believe it's a rule that if your router is going to die on you, it will do so while you're out of town. I appear to be back up now, but it was quite the weird experience.

I log in from my hotel room and notice that while I can ssh in to my host, I cannot get to the web site. I reset the website (sometimes that happens) but still nothing. I then begin to wonder if my cable company is causing me grief, as they just recently shut down my email server. Before I know it, I can't even SSH into the machine anymore which is strange because my ssh connection that is still open is, well, still open. But it can't communicate back out to do any nslookups or anything. So then I'm wondering if the DNS has gone down or something bizarre like that.

Eventually that window died as well and then for the last two days I've had no contact at all with my machine . My domain names are up for renewal (but I thought that was in a few weeks!) so I had a weird feeling that they'd disappeared on me. I checked that (I'm at a conference in the middle of a keynote using the meeting room wifi connection to check the status of my domain names :)) but as I thought they don't expire for weeks.

Then later Monday evening I'm talking to my wife and she says "The computer doesn't work, says it can't see Google or sometihng." At that point I realized that it probably wasn't the outside in (or at least, not only that) but something internal.

I just got home. Reset the cable modem, reset the router, bounced the web server, and I seem to be back up.
We shall see.