It's Back to School Time...for ME!

Yup. One more go at it. I've been accepted into a Radiology Assistant program in Utah and will be spending the next two years living like a student again.  No sleep, late nights, crappy diet. Classes are all online but I will have to visit the campus in Ogden twice per semester for the next five semesters. Aside from that, I will be spending 24 hours each week with a Radiologist learning his trade (as well as holding my full time job, of course).

But in the end, I'll be ten times better at my job and have a whole list of new skills. My new title will be Radiology Practitioner Assistant or Radiology Assistant.  They get used fairly interchangeably.

If you want to see why I'm up to, visit my student blog: http://weberrastudent.blogspot.com/

I gotta get going, I have to figure out how I'm going to pay for this education now.

~OJD

Videos: BugOut Retreat & Wifey's Uber Craftroom

9:30am and I'm two hours past my bedtime but here are a couple of videos I wanted to share. The first is a video of the retreat we have begun to renovate/update in Northern Arizona. We've been there a total of three times so far and have MUCH work to do.

The second video is Wifey's craft room. I think it is safe to say we've used just about all of the usable space for her FOUR sewing machines, serger, yarn, etc etc. Aside from a few more minor adjustments in the craft room, I can now focus on THE GARAGE (cheers from the crowd!)

SurvivalBlog.com Disruption (use the dotted quad address 95.143.19.148)

SurvivalBlog.com Disruption (use the dotted quad address 95.143.19.148)

Using a raw IP address, sometimes called a dotted quad address, is a handy trick worth knowing any time a website becomes unreachable through its normal domain name. Every website actually lives at a numeric IP address, and the domain name you normally type in is just a friendly label that gets translated into that number behind the scenes by DNS servers. When DNS is having problems, whether from an attack, a misconfiguration, or a provider outage, the site itself might be running perfectly fine even though the familiar web address will not load.

Typing the IP address directly into your browser bypasses that DNS lookup step entirely and connects straight to the server, which is why it can work even when the regular domain name is down. The tradeoff is that IP addresses can change over time as a site moves hosting providers, so a saved IP address is really only a short-term workaround rather than a permanent bookmark. It also will not work for sites that rely on shared hosting, where many different websites live at the same IP address and the server needs the domain name to know which site to serve you.

For anyone who relies on a handful of critical websites for news, research, or preparedness information, it is worth knowing this trick exists even if you never need to use it. Keeping a note of the current IP address for a site you visit often, alongside a backup way to reach it like a cached version or an alternate mirror, is a small bit of extra resilience that costs nothing and can save real frustration during an outage.

As of 20:39 July 8th (MST)

Hack attack confirmed by JWR. Survivalblog has been under attack since July 4th and they are "being forced to change servers".  Please bookmark the dotted quad addresses (seen below).

US Server = http://64.92.111.122/
Swede Server = http://95.143.193.148/

As I stated LAST TIME THIS HAPPENED, remind yourself that this is a good reason to buy JWR's CD archive of his entire site. It is only $4.97 on Amazon right (link) now and includes 2005 through 2011. Hurry, it might not be there long.

As of 20:03 July 8th (MST)

It appears SurvivalBlog.com is having difficulty with their URL again. You can still access the website information by typing the dotted quad address:

http://95.143.19.148/

If you haven't bookmarked this address yet, now would be a good time.  If I find out more information, I'll edit this post.

~OJD

Prior DoS attack info here, trying to post current info here.

Post from The Retreat

Just got here and already feel my stress melting away. I don't know what it is about being in the Hinterboonies that raises the spirits so high but rainbows seem to be a factor.

I may have finally uploaded some video of the retreat successfully onto YouTube.  Looks like the only video that uploaded was a little 12 second shot I did. The longer version is waiting for a wifi connection to upload. I should have it up by tomorrow.