I quite them over the 'Virgin Killers' debacle of 2008 (this wasn't the first time I had issues with their IWF implementation either), and like so many other customers I have issues with their customer support department. I wrote it up here: http://www.w3bbo.com/demonsucks.htm.

It's a shame, because their network is actually alright, I didn't get that much downtime and had no limits or caps for what I felt was a reasonable monthly fee (I was on their HomeOffice 8000 plan, the one with the static IP address).

Their full name is "Powerbocking Stilts" actually, and they use a bow-spring as well, they've been around since 2004. I think CMU needs to move with the times. The claims about 9-foot jumps seems about right, the world record for a bock-assisted jump is just over 7 feet. I was at a bocking event in London last weekend, actually. (Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/w3bbo/sets/72157622131665912/ )

In my head I equated orbit length to "width of the year" since I was thinking of a timeline, and a timeline has width (from 1st Jan to Dec 31st) and at each point on the timeline the earth is at a certain point on its orbit which corresponds to a distance from its initial position.

No, that's diameter of the earth's orbit around the sun. A year would be the circumference which is 940 million kilometers.

The DNS RFCs advise that zone nameservers should be in separate subnets. Specifically RFC 2182 recomends that secondary DNS services be spread around geographically.

Having just installed the x64 3.0 binaries for Windows and given Windows 7 and Windows Vista a spin in VirtualBox I can say that both OSes fail to recognise the 3D capabilities since the driver isn't WDDM-compatible. So Media Center, Aero Glass, and the new games in Vista/Win7 all fail to show in their fully accelerated glory. Interestingly, VirtualPC 7 in Windows 7 does support Aero Glass when you have Vista as a guest.

The way the email was written (a bunch of short paragraphs) makes me think it's a kind of running commentary of the process he was following to download the software to begin with. I occasionally make similar notes as well, which often don't resemble my writing style at all.

As for not knowing there's a download center, I think he's acting in the character of a typical user who just wants to download the software, not something many software developers tend to do these days whilst they shovel in useless gimmicks in websites that distract from the main purpose.