Continuing the test. This sentence comes from the iMac after having removed the wireless router.

OK. I think we're back up. Chew on this story, tech-heads... late Friday night, I noticed that Safari was loading fourhman.com like shit. Slow response, missing graphics. I chalk it up to crappy network problems and go to bed. The next morning, fourhman.com is still loading lousy... but everything else is fine, slashdot, eBay, etc. But anything coming off of fourhman.com just will not load (including all my subsites: TaleSpin card game, Mappyland, etc.)

So I go to my hosting site, Dreamhost. Dreamhost has this great login panel where you control all aspects of your hosting, and they're usually really good about notifying users when they're having trouble. I haven't received any warning emails, so I figure I'll check my panel for updates. And I cannot get into my panel. Nothing loads on it, it just doesn't exist. So I figure that Dreamhost is having a problem... and I email them to see what's up.

They get back to me within a couple hours... no, we're not having any issues... your site loaded fine here. Now I'm stymied. Everything seems to be fine except for my site and Dreamhost.

Troubleshooting begins: I pull out my wireless router (Linksys WRT54G) and go direct from cable modem to iMac. Now everything works. Fourhman.com loads beautifully. Put the router back in service, and my stuff dies again.

So I ask you: why would my router be purposefully inhibiting my own site, plus the Dreamhost hosting interface? I set the thing to factory defaults, no change. I turn everything off for 30 minutes, no change.

So I bought a new WRT54G (the v2 model, which has many less LEDs than the v1 model) for $70 and now everything is fine again.

Disposable technology. Pfft.