Category Archives: Technology and Society

Business, Technology and Society, Weird

Weird Internet Issue

13 Comments

My desktop has quit communicating with Slack (slack.com). I can access it from a laptop, but not from my desktop. It acts like a DNS issue, but I can ping everything except it. It just started doing this a couple hours ago, and I didn’t change anything. Any ideas?

[Update a while later]

[root@localhost ~]

# ping slack.com
PING slack.com (54.87.197.95) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
— slack.com ping statistics —
14 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 13292ms

Same thing happens when I ping the address directly. So it’s not a DNS issue. Very strange that I can get to it from the Windows laptop, but not the Linux desktop.

[Update late afternoon]

It’s back up. I guess I was one of the one percent.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Aaaaaaand it’s down again. At least now I know there’s nothing I can do about it, and no point in wasting time trying to figure it out. I just have to hope that they’ll get it sorted.

Business, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Latest Spam Phone Calls

12 Comments

OK, they’re not really spam, because they ask, “Is Rand Simberg there?” But that’s all they do, despite a clear machine request to leave a message. They’ve come from three or four different numbers. One of them asks repeatedly, “Is Rand Simberg there?” for over a minute (it’s my business line, so it just says “This is Interglobal Media [my corporation], please leave a message.”). I can’t help but believe, despite (or because of) the fact that they are looking for me, that these are people with whom I have no interest in talking. If they were legitimate, they’d leave a damn message what it’s about and leave a call-back number.

BTW, yes, posting has been light, because I’ve been very busy. Fortunately, in a potentially highly lucrative way.