Technoupgrade

I’m most of the way through composing a new post about my fun new techno toy (“toy” being tongue-in-cheek, because this little iPhone just might be the greatest thing to hit my desk in the last dozen years or so), but I wanted to give the WordPress app a whirl since I had a moment to spare while I’m between tasks today. So, if all goes well, here’s a picture of the last of the fall leaves.

okey-dokey

I’m still not entirely sure what happened with that little glitch in my sidebar, but the answer seemed to be switching themes. Isn’t the new DePo-Clean theme lovely? It suits my love of clean and streamlined things, and I love the Flickr plugin that puts the little pictures up top there. I’ve been a fan of Derek Powazek‘s for a loooooong time, and I am grateful, too, to Adam Freetly for making it widget-ready. There are still a few tweaks to be done, but it will do for the time being.

more weirdness

And now we can add to that last post that all of a sudden my photo, Etsy mini, and Flickr badge are now all missing from my sidebar. I’m just not equipped to deal with this today.

electronic weirdness

Not sure what is going on, but there seems to be some kind of capricious, selective electronic vortex surrounding my house.

I have been trying to get to marthastewart.com for three days now to access a couple articles of interest, but it will not let me get there. I get a “server not responding” error, no matter what browser I use. I have not found any other website that behaves this way. My husband tried last night from his PC laptop and his Palm and wasn’t able to make a connection either, although he was able to connect from the same laptop at work this morning. I’ve asked a few other people to try from assorted computers and locations, and they can all get in fine. I’ve cleared my cache and cookies; unplugged everything from the cable modem, router, and Vongage box and let them all rest for 20 minutes; restarted my computer — all to no avail.

Now, the really weird thing is that I can get to some things on the subdomain blogs1.marthastewart.com (Martha Blog, Dinner Tonight, and Bluelines [oh, alas for the demise of the printed Blueprint]), but not others (Bride’s Guide).

What little I understand of my net search results seems to point to something in the router’s firewall (although the site was working just fine last week), but I know next to nothing about networking and firewalls and am terrified to tackle this on my own lest I really mess something up (my net access is critical to my business, whereas access to Martha specifically is not). I’ll just have to wait until my IT guy can take a look at it.

Then, early this morning, my phone made a really weird beep and all of a sudden I had messages — eight of them, going back to late last week, all of them new to me. But in the meantime, I have received a few calls and checked voicemail. I don’t get a lot of calls, so it didn’t occur to me that I might be missing any. Apparently I was.

If I’m wearing a tinfoil hat next time you see me, you’ll know why.

back in business

Finally, the planets have realigned themselves and not only do I have outgoing e-mail again, but my Flickr badge has fixed itself, too. E-mail is my preferred mode of communicating with the outside world, so I’m glad to be part of it again.

lost

For some reason, I have not been able to send e-mail through my mail program since yesterday afternoon. It started with my virtuallori.com account, then worked its way through all my others. I can receive mail just fine; I just can’t send. Nothing in my settings has changed; all use the correct username and password, and are set to use authentication and the proper port. And my webmail (as much as I hate it) is working. It’s a mystery.