Propogate me, baby!
See if this sounds familiar. You get an idea for a new site. You find a domain name. You find a host. You sign up with both, marry the two together. You start building the site on the server, even though the domain hasn’t propogated yet, and you have to use that weird little IP thingie with the ~ and your [username] after it to look at the site.
And of course, some of your PHP scripts (or something) don’t like that IP~[username] address, so they just resolve themselves to the domain name. Your hope of testing the site and having it live by the time the curtain rolls up disappears in a puff of error message:
“www.thatreallygoodideayouhadlastweek.com cannot be found. Please check the name and try again.”
So you wait. And you struggle to keep those good ideas intact in your head. Days pass. Your creative impetus decides it wants to watch TV or get something to eat. You keep checking the domain to see if it’s resolved. You find yourself doing techie things that even your official GeekSquad Handbook does not rate as “cool” to see if it’s resolved and your computer’s just lying to you.
And you wait. Some of the time you wait quietly – perhaps bouncing in your chair impatiently and making little whiny “uh!” chimpanzee grunts of dissatisfaction. Other times, you curse. Threaten. Cajole. “Resolve now, and I’ll give you a special mint-oil backup every night.”
Still, it sits there, stubbornly refusing to exist.
Then you think of that episode of South Park where Kyle starts wondering what reality really is. You go all existential about this domain, which didn’t even exist as a concept until you hatched it the other day, and which still doesn’t exist in the sense of having any sort of form or mass. What is this thing that exists, but doesn’t exist, and somehow manages to tie up your life?
I think… I could be wrong, but I think it is neither the chicken nor the road, but the actual ill-understood and probably ill-conceived crossing thereof.
Om.
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