I’ve been busy for a few days now. Firstly I’ve been getting my act together for my upcoming laminotomy, which will take place next week Thursday. The science of back surgery has advanced significantly in the last ten or so years: the procedure will take place through two 1-centimeter holes instead of a four-inch-long incision, and will involve no yanking and rearranging of major nerves, unlike my last surgery. I will be under for a couple of hours and leave the facility that day, strictly an in-by-nine-out-by-five sort of thing. Hell, I may even get free Martinizing.

Secondly, I have recently gotten entirely too caught up in adult toys as of late (hmmm….probably could have phrased that a bit better). I hadn’t even finished with Bioshock when Half-Life 2: Episode Two came out. So then, while I took a break from greasing Splicers in Rapture to plug a few Zombines in HL2ep2, the frickin’ Crysis Single Player Demo comes out and I have to spend a few hours running around some anonymous, absolutely gorgeously rendered Philippine island plugging Korean commandos. That game’s graphics engine is absolutely stunning; I’m finally pushing my obnoxious new gaming rig to its limits.

On top of all this, I managed to convince my boss to pay for a full data package for my cell phone (took about five minutes to talk him into it; I love that man) so I had to go and get me a data-enabled phone. I picked the Samsung SCH-i760, a Windows Mobile 6 smart phone just released for my Verizon plan. I spent much of today (and will probably spend a decent chunk of tomorrow) getting this thing totally rigged for my contacts, email accounts and other stuff (still have to work out the VPN and get a MicroSD card for it….maybe a Bluetooth GPS as well). So far, I think the tentative verdict is that I love this phone more than Democracy (can you blame me? I’ve practically forgotten what it looked like), free markets (ditto) and apple pie (still too junked-out on leftover Halloween candy)….just about anything but my wife. I’ll post a more detailed mash note sometime in the near future.

But the real reason I’m writing this post is to ask a question: do any of you out there have problems connecting to my server? Not merely that it may be slow at times (this is the data line for the house, after all, and with three people checking their email, surfing the Web and seeding the occasional BitTorrent in here, access to the Web server may occasionally slow to a brisk crawl), or that it may occasionally not respond at all (I do shut it down for occasional maintenance, for as much as a half-hour or so at a a time).

What I’m talking about is more like this: you try to access the blog, your browser returns a timeout, you hit Refresh, and get connected immediately. Or maybe it takes two or three refreshes before you connect. Sometimes it may happen during the initial request, other times while you’re trying to post a comment.

The reason I ask is because I deal with that sort of problem with my blog on a daily basis from inside my local network. But I have all sorts of wierd shit going on with my local computers: multiple IP addresses tied to a single NIC, possible cross-contamination from having the LAN side of multiple routers plugged into a common network switch, allkindagoodshit. I’m not good enough with a packet analyzer to look at my requests and decide where they’re going wrong, and frankly, unless it’s happening to you my loyal public (hi you two!) as well, I’m probably to damn lazy to bother.

So let me know, willya? How fares your Uncle Andrew dot Net experience?