the Googleplex is (back) in the house ...

It's a good thing I have 9+ Internet devices at home. When one fails, I often just mosey to another, since the outage is frequently very temporary.

Such was the case with my Mac mini, which .. about a week or so ago .. inexplicably stopped accessing anything related to Google .. the search engine, Google Reader, Gmail, Blogger .. you name it. I could get to everything else, just not Google-anything.

This happened on the 2 browsers I have installed in addition to (the default) Safari .. namely Camino and Firefox .. so it had to be something lower in the stack. So, I used Yahoo! search and typed "unable to access google" and wandered across a suggestion to use a different DNS server (than the one my ISP thoughtfully provides). Okay, worth a try .. so I changed that preference in OS X .. waited a few minutes for the Mac to absorb the impact (ha!) and now I'm happily browsing again.

I suppose I should credit the nice folks at OpenDNS although I'll be derned if I know why the rest of the boxes on my LAN can see the Googleplex and not the Mac mini - presumably they're using the same DNS -- go figure.

Unrelated: my 500 GB LaCie disc/hub arrived today .. setup was uneventful. Now I have more than enough space for my iTunes collection. Good: the price was right, and the extra (very accessible) ports are a nice touch. Bad: both the Mac mini and the LaCie have the old Firewire 400 interface, so there's a perceptible lag when I fetch video from my iTunes library (although the audio seems okay).