If you’ve read Amy Foster or, even better, watched the movie Swept from the Sea (1997), you know how cruel social isolation and ostracism can be.
Amnon Rubinstein tells a similar story in The Jerusalem Post. The plot goes like this: Dr. Rosa Halberstam, an old and lonely, but very friendly lady, lives in her apartment in Tel Aviv. One room with a separate entrance is for rent.
We’ve just got a Notice of Server Migration from our hoster Kionic:
We are writing to inform you that we have detected a precondition which indicates a potential hardware failure on the server your account is hosted on: server012.kionic.com. To be on the safe side, we have scheduled a server migration to take place over the weekend of April 18th 2009. This process will result in very little to no down time and without any loss of data. (…)
Since the IP address will change, and since we are managing DNS ourselves, we will have to adjust the DNS entries accordingly. As a result, Cordula’s Web will be unreachable for a while during the migration (likely between 30 minutes and 3 hours, depending on the way your ISP DNS servers cache entries). Should the downtime unexpectedly last a little bit longer than that, please be patient and try again later: since we’re forewarned, we’ll be closely monitoring the migration and working on any problems that may arise.
We apologize for the inconveniance.
Edit (04/18/2009, 10:52 CEST): The migration should be complete now. We’ve just updated the DNS and everything seems to be running smoothly.
Without a kigo, not really a haiku, but that’s what I dreamed last night:
Every young bug’s crush
Was the windshield
Of a speeding car.
Love hurts, doesn’t it? But only the bug. The beautiful shining windshield at least doesn’t care about the young bug’s infatuation. Why should it? It remains unscratched and hardly notices the little creature which has the temerity of approaching the object of its love.
Or, to paraphrase Severin in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs: in love, we only have the choice of being the bug or the windshield.