Alphabetical Exceptions?

I'm not sure which side of the fence I'm on when it comes to country drop-down menus. I admit that I feel a tinge of relief and am slightly less inconvenienced when the United States gets placed at the top of these menus, regardless of its rightful place in the alphabetical country list (the bottom).

And I get why drop-down menus are designed this way - the company providing the software or service is American, and/or the company thinks that the majority of its users will be American and wants to simplify the sign-up process for as many people as possible.

But when all the other countries (often with the exception of the United Kingdom) are in alphabetical order, doesn't it look a little arrogant to have the U.S. put first on the list anyway? You can''t really argue with alphabetical.

I wonder I'd be more bothered by this if I lived in, say, Uganda? Or better yet, Venezuela?

Priorities, Dilemmas

Penelope Trunk wrote a thought-provoking article a few months back called "The Difficult Convergence: Work and Family by Age 30" that really hit home for me. 30 was always a pivotal age anyway, but especially so now that I'm not exactly sure what my next career step is, or if and when my child-rearing adventures will begin. It wasn't too long ago that I still felt like I had forever to figure it all out. Biologically, that number is more like five years.

Top 10 Things I Miss About Traveling (But Hated at the Time)

Brave New Traveler has just published an article of mine in which I describe the attitude shifts one must come to terms with after embracing a vagabond lifestyle:

When you travel for more than a few months at a
stretch, it becomes a job. A job you don’t really like all the time. A
job you start to complain about.

I should know - while skipping around the world
for a year, I did a lot less skipping than I did budgeting, reading
transportation timetables, and gesturing wildly to unsympathetic street
vendors.

But eventually the journey ends, you return to your normal life, and
something magical happens: you find yourself wanting that old job back,
warts and all.

Here are ten things I couldn’t stand then, but am pining for now.

Read the full article >>

Bio

Sarah Lane is a television and new media talent and producer who has both hosted and produced hundred of hours of live television. Her work has appeared on NBC, TechTV, G4, The Style Network, Current TV, and more than a dozen network affiliates nationwide. She is currently the Director of Production at internet television network Revision3, and host of modern pop culture show popSiren. She's not sure if "modern pop culture" is the best way to describe her show, but she hopes you'll at least be intrigued enough to check it out.

One of Sarah's first jobs was segment producing in San Jose, CA, for a TV show called New Media News. In those years the first internet bubble had not yet burst, and she spent a large chunk of her time interviewing 25-year old CEOs about their Next Big Things. Sarah would like to say that during these interviews she had the incredible foresight to see through all of their fatally flawed business models, but that would be a bit of an embellishment.

As the Senior Segment Producer for a computer-centric show called "The Screen Savers" at TechTV in San Francisco, Sarah's daily subject matter got her hooked on all things geeky. Ok, maybe not all things. But many things. Many things geeky. Anyway, after a couple of years, Sarah moved into an on-camera position, which gave her the ability to share her many things geeky with a very large audience while wearing lipstick and eyeshadow.

In 2004, Sarah migrated south to Los Angeles to work for G4 and was the first female co-host of the network's daily live variety hour "Attack of the Show!" She lived in Santa Monica and ate a lot of Mexican food and occasionally wore hair extensions and false eyelashes on the set. LA was fun.

In 2006, Sarah took a year off from her career to travel through Greece, Turkey, Russia, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, Brazil, and Argentina. She co-produced a quirky video podcast on life abroad, and also maintained a multimedia travelogue featuring videos, photos, and stories.

Sarah now lives and works in San Francisco, the greatest city ever (which she feels she can say pretty honestly, having been around the world and all). You can usually find her inhaling a plate of nachos or obeying the wishes of her overlords.

• View Sarah's LinkedIn resume.
• Email Sarah at sarah at sarahlane dot com.

DNS, Subdomains, and Mapping, Oh My!

Several years ago, I started up this blog right around the time I acquired the domain of my own name. Back then, I had zero experience with the Domain Name System (DNS) and didn't really understand the difference between mapping a domain and redirecting from one domain to another. So I asked the advice of a very geeky friend.

"Stick with redirects, " he said. "Domain mapping can be a tricky thing. There are 500-page books out there about DNS."

Clearly my very geeky friend did not feel like helping me that day, and I didn't want to read a 500-page book about DNS, so I steered clear of domain mapping altogether. Once I switched over to Typepad, all that really meant was that when you visited my website, instead of seeing 'sarahlane.com' in the URL, you saw 'sarahlane.typepad.com'. It didn't bother me.

But then it started to bother me a little. As I've joined more services and acquired more blogs over the years, it's begun to make a lot more sense why people want to organize as much of their online life as possible under the umbrella of a single domain. It's like branding yourself well.

After thinking long and hard about it for five minutes, I decided to map the subdomain 'blog.sarahlane.com' to this Typepad blog, map the subdomain 'tumblelog.sarahlane.com' to my Tumblr tumblelog, and leave my domain 'sarahlane.com' unmapped and free to use as I please. In theory, these tweaks aren't a big deal. A few CNAME entries and I should have been good to go. But the issues began when I started making DNS changes with my registrar when I should have been making them with my web host (consider using your registrar as your web host if you have issues with organization. Seriously). I won't go into the gory details of my personal DNS hell, but let's just say tech support people sometimes withhold very important information for no explicable reason at all (I mean clearly they're bored and resentful having to read 500-page books about DNS all day, but still). Every time I incorrectly updated my name servers, my server went down. Server, server, server. If you look at the word 'server' long enough, it really becomes ridiculous, doesn't it? SER-VER.

The beauty of DNS is that depending on where in the world you are, DNS changes can take between 12-72 hours to reach you. So a lot of my tech support phone calls sounded very similar to the following exchange:

• Me: Ok, I did what you asked. My site is still down. What's going on?
• Them: Mmmm... yeah. I can pull up your site just fine. So. Yeah.
• Me: Trust me, I can't. I would not lie about something like this.
• Them: Yeah, well. DNS... Propagate... Server... Caching... Flushing... Wait 48 hours.

I'm currently unemployed, which in many ways is a very positive thing. I get to eat all day in my pajamas and I rarely have to bathe. It's kind of awesome. But I'm also glued to my computer all day every day writing, editing, looking for work, and so on. I really can't wait for 48 hours for my website to magically reappear, especially after I've just emailed about four thousand people the link to my resume. 48 hours is like looking across a vast sea of infinite nothingness. I dislike the rules of DNS very much.

As of this afternoon my site's back up, so I'm going to stop crying and consider taking a shower. My mail server has also taken a beating, so if you sent me an email anytime in the past five days, I have probably not received it, and may never receive it. I'm sure it was a good email though. Well, unless you're Brad from Australia. I don't know what's up with that guy.