electronic weirdness

Not sure what is going on, but there seems to be some kind of capricious, selective electronic vortex surrounding my house.

I have been trying to get to marthastewart.com for three days now to access a couple articles of interest, but it will not let me get there. I get a “server not responding” error, no matter what browser I use. I have not found any other website that behaves this way. My husband tried last night from his PC laptop and his Palm and wasn’t able to make a connection either, although he was able to connect from the same laptop at work this morning. I’ve asked a few other people to try from assorted computers and locations, and they can all get in fine. I’ve cleared my cache and cookies; unplugged everything from the cable modem, router, and Vongage box and let them all rest for 20 minutes; restarted my computer — all to no avail.

Now, the really weird thing is that I can get to some things on the subdomain blogs1.marthastewart.com (Martha Blog, Dinner Tonight, and Bluelines [oh, alas for the demise of the printed Blueprint]), but not others (Bride’s Guide).

What little I understand of my net search results seems to point to something in the router’s firewall (although the site was working just fine last week), but I know next to nothing about networking and firewalls and am terrified to tackle this on my own lest I really mess something up (my net access is critical to my business, whereas access to Martha specifically is not). I’ll just have to wait until my IT guy can take a look at it.

Then, early this morning, my phone made a really weird beep and all of a sudden I had messages — eight of them, going back to late last week, all of them new to me. But in the meantime, I have received a few calls and checked voicemail. I don’t get a lot of calls, so it didn’t occur to me that I might be missing any. Apparently I was.

If I’m wearing a tinfoil hat next time you see me, you’ll know why.