You're being too hard on yourself.

I know how the Internet works, and it took me an hour to wonder why one machine in my home could access the site a few days ago, but another could not. Answer: the machines used different name servers to resolve www.andrewsullivan.com, which sounds like what happened when you wandered into your friend's office.

If you still want to chat about how screwed up this is, we can arrange an IM session for rapid fact exchange. --- Mark

Let me explain this DNS/nameserver issue a bit.

Web sites are specified by host names. Host names are resolved into IP addresse by name servers (DNS servers). A host name has one or two "authoritative nameservers" that provide the IP address for their concerned hostnames to other nameservers that ask for the address resolution.

Once a nameserver that is not authoritative for a hostname gets an IP address, it can hold onto (cache) the response for a length of time specified by the TTL (time to live). So if you ask this nameserver for the IP address for a host for which it has a cached answer, it gives you the answer out of its cache, and it will continue to give this answer out of its cache for a length of time equal to the TTL. When the TTL expires, that nameserver will return, when asked by your browser, essentially, to the authoritative nameserver again to get the IP address of the host in question.

Your machine appears to have been handed back a cached address during your 'frustrated' period, while your friend's nameserver did not have a cached address - so his nameserver went to the authorititave server to get the address --- which was apparently the address blogger was then using.

Addresses appear to be changing at blogger.com -- that's my diagnosis. After a length of time TTL, all nameservers on the Internet will then be handing out the same address for the given hostname - a few other things being equal, which I won't go into.

Are you saying that more than just www.andrewsullivan.com's address has changed in the last 24 hours or so??

I'll drink to that!

Andrew Sullivan took almost forever to connect today.
But about that story Jacob was linked to :
When I was in Brazil, not as a tourist but to live with my Brazilian wife, I not only had to have my fingerprints taken for the Federal Police but had to have another set taken for the local civil police.
As for human rights...well

I don't know if this is relevant, or if it is explained in one of the comments - because they are written in a language with which I am unfamiliar - but, for a couple of days now, attempts to reach www.andrewsullivan.com are met with the following statement: AndrewSullivan.com is updating. Please check back in five minutes.