Sinister: The Great Sinister Bump of October 2005

[honey at xxx.org]

What ho, Sinister.

Today's the day of a solar eclipse apparently, for those of you far
south enough: even though I only just woke up, apparently it's all
over bar the shouting by now which seems a bit churlish of our local
star and satellite to do it so early on in the day.  There are some
fantastic webcam "shots" of the live eclipse from Dublin which consist
of cloud, and more cloud.  Yay for the British Isles!

Anyway, it's also the day of another major cataclysmic event. 
You'll all have been bored to tears by now with me bleating on about
"... AOL... spam... idiots... spam... hosting company..." etc. so I'm
hoping one of our remaining AOL users, should they happen perchance
(and it really is a perchance by now) to receive this message, won't
mark *this* one as spam too.  Else we all go down together.

No, October 2005 is also a celestial event for Sinister, and will
be known in centuries to come as The Great Bump of Sinister: we're
moving home.  Hopefully it won't also turn into an eclipse.  I won't
bore you to tears again, but suffice to say moving has been a few weeks
work in preparing the ground, moving all the list software to a nice
new garden where the spades aren't all rusty and people don't throw
rubbish over the fench.  It will give me great pleasure to tell the old
hosting company to take their gardening shears and shove them (vague
on-topic allusion) should The Great Bump work successfully. This mail
getting through will indicate that I haven't made a complete mess up
so far.

Bump One consisted of me wrestling back the domain (missprint.org)
from the hands of some outlaws while outmanoeuvring their attempts to
extort a fee after Miss Print's domain registrar (which turned out to
be a man on a mobile phone) packed in and ran off to hide. Bump Two
is just now which is me moving the domain over to a new nameserver:
it'll probably take a day or so.  The real bump will happen after
this when I then move the mailing list software, webpages, list crush
(remember that?), etc etc. over to the new hosting server where it's
all laid out neatly in rows between the carrots, waiting for rain.

But I thought I'd better mail you now just in case the list disappears
for a few hours and mail bounces.  I shouldn't think so, but I
wouldn't want any of you to think we went anywhere if there were a
brief eclipse.  You might want to all take the precaution of wearing
sunglasses for the day and avoiding staring directly at the list.

You don't have to do anything, and the best result will be that you
won't notice any difference, other than that some AOL users may start
getting mail again, and we won't all be under imminent threat of losing
the lot.  All you have to do is hold onto the rails while The Bump
occurs, and should anything untoward happen, wait a day or so then mail
me and tell me.  No list addresses, web addresses etc. will change.
When we've gone past Bump Three in a few days or so, something will
inevitably break, because I'm stupid, like the nursery won't work, or
part of the web pages will be broken.  Your task is then to mail me and
tell me, because I won't see it.  Moving will also solve the problem of
the photo galleries (remember them?) and list archives all living on
borrowed space, because they'll all start living at Miss Print's now.
This is a convenient point at which to thank Heath of nodata.org who's
hosted them for years: we should all send him roses.  All the silly
links I put in place to make the archive work will have been removed,
and you'll be able to link directly to posts in the archive now, etc.

*Should* any AOL users get this mail (and it looks like that also
includes cs.com subscribers), then hi :)  I can assure you that AOL
have at least been telling me frequently that your mail has been
bouncing - see previous messages in the archive - so you will have
definitely missed stuff.  As did subscribers from demon.co.uk a few
weeks ago - I think they missed one or two.  The reasons for this are
too stupid to even go into, but consist of corporations who confuse
the words "elbow" and "arse".

I'll repeat my recommendation that all people using AOL should think
very hard about migrating to a sensible ISP, as I can't guarantee
they won't blacklist us from our new home if any of your fellow AOLers
decide Sinister mail is spam, although the soil is more fertile there
and I'll do what I can to preempt this.  I can pretty much guarantee
though that the new hosting company aren't stupid enough to blacklist
the rest of you because of AOL.  I'll also repeat the warning that
hotmail and MSN users may also experience problems should Microsoft,
who own your addresses, carry out a threat with regards to bullying the
world to use their anti-spam system in a few months time.  But that's
only a maybe, so I guess you could sit tight and see.

So in summary, congratulations on passing through Bump One successfully
without knowing it, and welcome to Bump Two.  Please tighten your
seat-belts and refrain from smoking until the cabin lights are
extinguished.  Should all go well, the actual list, website etc. will
move sometime this week and we will have passed Bump Three, and the
stewards will be along to serve you light refreshments.  No list
addresses will change, the list web pages will still look charmingly
bad in their 1997 style, and we will still live at missprint.org: in
fact all your embarrassing mails from when you were 17 that you wish
weren't there will still be online at missprint.org when you're 80.
I guarantee it, should the sun not explode by then.

I'm allowed to post really long mails because it saves me having to
explain it all 50 times via private mails. *Cough* - sorry.

LIST CONTENT: Ken as far as I know is still not married.  I can't
recall anyone remarking on just how much the WarChild song, "The Eighth
Station Of The Cross Kebab House" (best title eva) sounds like The
Specials, should any of you have downloaded it.  Oh yes it does.  Yes,
it is a horrible site, and they do wrap the song up in nasty closed
licencing restrictions meaning you probably have to have a blue PC on
wheels to play it and if anyone else hears it it'll self-destruct; but
I suppose you have to let charities make mistakes that others don't.

To all tapetree listeners, I apologise in advance: you'll understand
when you get it.  I got a bit carried away.  By the way it's not a
tape tree, as it neither consists of tapes, nor has a tree-like
structure.  It's a CD SNAKE.

And can I say, while I'm here, that you all forgot what the list
crush was.  It's here:

http://www.missprint.org/sinister/crush.html

Does no-one have crushes anymore?  You also all forgot to send in
pictures which live here:

http://www.missprint.org/sinister/#photos

Admittedly that might have been my fault for not putting any up for
about 3 years, but I am turning over a new leaf, and once The Great
Bump's over will be trawling back through those sent and putting them
up.  I'd particularly like to see some more Things We Made In School
Today, Mummy:

http://www.missprint.org/cgi-bin/photo.cgi?gallery=things

to pin on the fridge.  Finally you *forgot about the Sinister
library*:

http://www.missprint.org/sinister/library/

Krister in particular may want to pop in and hide a book between
the shelves?  It's less ephemeral than posting to the list, and you
can always refer to it in a post so people can go and have a read.
This also affords me a brief plug of my chum Ciara's new site, as
she was the first to ever send me a story for the library, which you
can read there (it's great).  Ciara is also always ON TOPIC for she
is the cover girl for If You're Feeling Sinister and therefore the
list's mascot, should she like it or not.  Her new site for her poetry
(which is as good as her stories) is at:

http://www.ciaramaclaverty.co.uk

With regards to the artist formerly known as Starry and now called
the very formal Sarah Clarke because she works on a trout farm: her
comments on Scott "Scotty" Walker are mathematically proven correct
(although "Tilt" is a bit much for me), and I can only scream at you to
hear "The Seventh Seal" from Scott 4 (not the band, the LP).  And with
regard to the subject of her post, to remind you of the best joke in
the world: "what's big and small at the same time?"

A BIG EGG.

Honey x
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