As of about noon today, I’ll be offline for roughly a week – no internet access from (either) home, no computer access, no nothing. The move is in its last phase and I’m headed off to MA tomorrow morning to get myself moved into my new place in Hadley. I got a ramshackle old 3 bedroom farmhouse less than 5 miles from work, thank god for a little elbow room after a year and a half in my cottage. Anyway, I think I’ve responded to all outstanding emails – if I missed yours, apologies, I promise to reply as soon as I’m back on the net.

The server will not be going down as Andrew has graciously agreed to let it live on his network until I can get things up and running in MA. Please be kind to the machine until it’s back on my own network, especially in the evening hours when Andrew is likely to be playing Battlefield 2 and not too happy to have his latency increase – stay out of the image gallery unless you absolutely must, and if you must, do so during the day.

If you need to get ahold of me, use the cell phone number found from the contact links above.

So I’m in the midst of moving. I went with a pod this time. So far so good, I’ll post more as soon as the process is finished. But the reason I’m posting is this site may come and go over the next several days and at some point between now and March 1 it may go away for several days or possibly even a week or more. Much depends on Charter internet service in MA – we’ll see how quickly they turn around my order for service, and whether they block port 80.

The webcams will be down as well, yes, even the working one, as of tomorrow morning when I bring down my media server.

The one downside to using pods is I will lose access to my stuff for about a week. Good thing I got some practice keeping myself entertained with the recent power outage – soon enough I’ll have no access to any of my toys and be stuck sitting around a barren cottage. I’d go hiking but the weather’s looking to be pretty cold so I doubt that’s on the agenda. We’ll see how it goes. For now you can expect infrequent to nonexistent updates here until after the first, barring some alternative arrangements (like parking my server in Andrew’s basement for a couple of weeks).

So we had a minor natural disaster – 70+mph winds came blowing through and knocked out power in the region. Figures Saratoga Springs and Greenfield Center suffered the worst damage in the entire region. Parts of Saratoga had no power for three days and I lost it from Friday morning through late Saturday night. So what’s an internet geek to do in such a case? Well…

• Read a novel. Actually, 1.5 novels. I started Kim Robinson’s ‘Red Mars,’ then decided it was not to my taste 1/3 of the way through, and switched to Octavia Butler’s The Fledgling. Given that the only candles I had in the house were tea lights, and they were scattered everywhere around my living room, I figured a vampire story was appropriate. It was a decent book too.
• Lacking any news at all for more than 24 hours, start to imagine that you’re having a repeat of the widespread power outage from several years ago.
• Curse the lack of gasoline in your car and your inability to acquire more.
• Realize you should have withdrawn some cash from the bank since you have no way of getting any more. Vow to always keep $200 in cash hidden in the house from now on.
• Curse well water, pumps, and the lack of flushing toilets or water of any kind. But especially the toilets.
• Daydream about the hot shower you so badly want.
• Muse in wonder at just how quickly the fabric of modern society crumbles with the lack of power.
• Lay around on your couch thankful that you have a gas heater that’s still working.

Now here’s something pretty unique – Prospero is a sort of peer to peer banking system. You create an account and then can either choose to lend others money by bidding on their requests for loans, or you can borrow money. To help spread the risk of users defaulting on loans you can also band together in consortia to help spread the financial risk across your membership. Consortias also help build a credit history for your members which increases your chances of succesfully getting other users business. This is pretty cool stuff. I’m immediately sure that this will be ripe for abuse in the same way that paypal and ebay have been, but despite this I’m sufficiently interested in trying it that I’ll risk some money on the concept. Anyone interested in joining together in a consortium to spread the risk? We could each put up $100 and see how it goes. Who knows, we could be the next Bank of America. Post in the comments if you want in.

[via Futurismic]

As a brief aside, whoever’s in charge of Prospero’s website has done a fantastic job – clear, helpful infographics and a nice clean style.