I'm so excited to finally have a real virtual home (and thank you, James, for the housewarming balloons! :-). I've lived at the mercy of others for so long, depended on the kindness and generosity of strangers (okay, friends, mostly), that it's really startling to realize that this domain really is mine, all mine, and as long as I keep paying my bills, I get to keep it! :-)
Homes I have had in the past:
- mud.bsd.uchicago.edu: given to me as a student at U Chicago, extended
as a courtesy by friends who worked in the computing section for quite a
while thereafter (it's amazing what they can get away with :-). I was
pretty happy there, but eventually panicked at the CDA, and decided I'd
best move my site out of country, just in case. Posted a plea somewhere
or other, and was picked up by:
- www.internet-ireland.com.ie: I was here for a while, and I honestly
don't remember why I left. I think someone had given me hosting space,
and eventually their boss got mad at them for it. But by then I had met
Dale Larson, and he'd published my book at his company, Intangible Assets
Manufacturing, and so I ended up at:
- www.iam.com/maryanne: Again, I was happy here for a while until the
company folded. :-) Before too long, the new owners of the domain name
were kindly wanting me gone, please, and by then I was a grad student at
Mills, so I moved to:
- www.mills.edu: This one had an unholy long URL that I can't even
remember anymore. It also had pretty sucky tech support -- they acted
like they were doing us a favor when they condescended to help us, and
half the time, I think I knew more than they did. But it was still free,
and so I suffered it until I graduated and moved to:
- users.lanminds.com/~mohanraj: And here I fairly contentedly paid
$20/month for an acount. I can, for the most part, recommend LanMinds.
Excellent tech support, nice people, based in Berkeley. My only complaint
is that they have overly-aggressive spam filtering, so that fairly often
(and more often lately, it seems) mail to me would bounce from domains as
innocuous as sirius.com... But when I realized all I realized needed was
a web host, not dial-up access (the University will give me that for the
next five years), I decided it was really time for the final switch,
to:
- www.mamohanraj.com, hosted by Pair. Eventually I'll graduate, and
then I'll need a dial-up again, but that's far enough in the future, that
I'm just not going to think about it yet. Until then, I'll be happy and
content with my new ISP.
I assume you've all updated your bookmarks; also update your e-mail contact info for me as well; anything@mamohanraj.com will get to me now, though I suspect I'll be telling people maryanne@mamohanraj.com for the most part. But if you prefer hobbit@mamohanraj.com or smut@mamohanraj.com or sillygoober@mamohanraj.com, they'll all work. I'm still trying to figure out how to set my return address to be one of those, rather that a pair.com address.
And if you *want* to wander around the net telling webmasters to update their links to me, that'd be great. I've told Yahoo; I'm probably going to wait a few weeks and then do an AltaVista search and try and notify all the webmasters with old links. Gonna be a chore, though.
Hanne's reading was a lot of fun, btw, and I'm really glad I got to meet her. Thomas Roche read a totally hot story, and read it really well; if you get a chance to hear him read, go for it. Jed and I spent some of Sunday doing the changeover, and the rest of it sort of puttering around, trying to decide what to read at Bardic last night (which we went to at Greyhaven; I enjoyed it more than Jed did, I think -- oh well). Dinner with Karen and Par, at Sweet Basil on Solano -- really excellent Thai. Recommended. Good day.
I'm not sure if we're planning to do much of anything today; Jed's been having trouble sleeping, so he knocked himself out with some sleeping pills last night and will hopefully sleep himself out today. I think I'm going to go read for a while; I'm most of the way through John Irving's Cider House Rules, which was pretty slow at first, but has now picked up quite nicely.
Have a good week, my dears!