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Python

Pigs and Cows and a Tiny Little Server Farm

There’s a weblog that I like to read on a regular basis. It’s called Pork Tornado, and the guy, Dusty, is hilarious most of the time. Very dry humour.

But I’ve had lots of trouble connecting to the site, with the domain name system (DNS) unable to find the site all the time. I’ve tried from work, at home, and even from my computer in Canada. Sometimes I can load the site, sometimes I can’t. I honestly thought that their DNS entries were misconfigured and not refreshing themselves on the Internet properly. I wrote a Python script, even, to regularly look up the site’s DNS information to track the history of the intermittent problem. I had the script running on the above-mentioned three machines.

But just two days ago, I figured out the real problem: it was me all along. All this time I’ve been typing

http://porktornado.dairyland.com/

instead of

http://porktornado.diaryland.com/

Can you see the difference? Now try the links. The first one doesn’t work; the second one does. Now here’s my explanation.

I honestly thought that the site was related to dairies (cows) and it never crossed my mind that the key word was “diary” (writing in a journal). How dumb. Besides, the website is a bit cartoonish, so I just assumed “cows” again, cause cows are oftentimes drawn as cartoon characters. Furthermore, I had been really careful to spell “porktornado” correctly because it is a difficult word to type and I didn’t want to accidentally type “toronado”. There you have it.

Now that I’ve got it right, I really need to just make a bookmark of the dumb site.