I find it highly amusing that my rant about goals and things i'd like to do for 2005 is late. I was going to post it on friday, but changes at the store and various holiday stuffs (the 31st was our first anniversary, after all) has forced me to put it aside as i run around with a fire extinguisher. I want to just update you folks on two things real quick, then i need to get back work.

We had intended to re-open the new Megagear store on saturday, but we ran into some snags that I am still working my way through. Nothing serious, just lots of little things that are adding up to a lot more time to fix and coordinate than i at first thought. It doesn't matter how hard you try to account for every possible need, when you jump there is always something that comes out of the woodwork that you didn't expect. I'll keep you posted on the store status.

In the past several months, i've been getting emails from various people saying that they cannot reach the megatokyo site. There are always instances why, for some reason, someone may not be able to reach our servers for various reasons, but i was starting to get a lot of them, and they were talking about not having been able to reach the website for months, and being able to reach it at school, but not from home. We double checked things on our end, and there was nothing we could find that would in any way block these people from accessing megatokyo. The only commonality we were noticing was that all of them were Verison customers.

Ukyo (theCologuys dude :P) did some digging, and spoke worked with some people who were having this problem, and we have narrowed down what it is. Here's what Ukyo asked me to pass on:

'Verizon has blocked port 53 on a number of IP Blocks. This basically means that DNS requests going to any IP's in those blocks don't go anywhere. You can ping the servers and you can access them by IP. That is because only the DNS port is blocked. Why are they doing this? No idea. Can't even get them to admit to it even though so many of their customers have shown clear evidence of this.'

'NetGear router users:'

'Please check yoru DHCP settings on your computer. You can do this under Xp by going to Stat -> Control Panel -> Networks, double-click your LAN icon. Click the support tab, and hit the details button. If your DNS servers say something like 192.168.1.1, or anything that starts with 192.168. That means your netgear is acting as a DNS server. We found that some people can login to their netgear, goto the status tab, and get the assigned DNS server IP's from verizon and use those. To use them, goto the properties of your LAN icon, highlight TCP/IP and click the 'settings' button. You will see the option to 'Specify DNS Servers'. Check that and fill in the blanks. This has worked for most people.'

'For those that this does not work for, please contact Verison and open a trouble ticket. Tell them you and many others are having the exact same problem, and it is a NOC (pronounced "Knock") issue.'

So, in short, for some reason we can't fathom, we are part of a block of IPs that Verision is blocking. We have tired to contact them to fix the problem, but they won't talk to us. So, if you or someone you know is having this problem, please pass this info on to them. Maybe if enough actual customers complain, they will do something about it.

Ok, i've got to get back to working on some Worldship integration issues. >_< Just to give myself some breathing room (and because i know this is what is gonna happen anyway) i'm going to say that the ETA for monday's comic is 12 noon on monday. If everything falls into place today like it supposed to, that shouldn't be too hard of a deadline to hit. But we all know how good i am with deadlines :)