Hi, this is Mike Stone, network administrator for YAWP.COM. Richard asked me to explain why this site has been gone for the past couple of weeks.

The short version is: the bridge washed out.

The computers that make up my network are physically located in Iowa City, Iowa. You may have heard about Iowa City on the news recently, what with it being under water and all.

Actually, that hasn't caused me any problems. My building is far enough uphill from the river that I haven't sustained any direct damage from the flooding. If you want to split hairs, I could say that my network has been running perfectly the whole time. Unfortunately, every byte of data that goes between my network and the internet passes through Cedar Rapids.

You may have heard about Cedar Rapids on the news recently, what with it being even worse off than Iowa City.

When the people from the phone company were looking for a place to put their switching station, they apparently didn't take the whole 'uphill from the river' idea into account. The whole facility is currently a real-life demonstration of that basic network troubleshooting principle, "computers tend to operate poorly when they're underwater."

We've finally managed to build a path around the damage, so the data is once again going through. There will probably be more changes here on the back end of things as we continue to fix stuff, but with any luck we'll be able to handle them in a way that doesn't interrupt your biweekly Lickskillet fix.