Suddenly, on Monday night I could no longer upload new content to this blog. My ISP said it wasn't them, my webhost said it wasn't them, the folks behind my blog app (Sandvox) said it wasn't them. The consensus was that some firewall setting on my trusty Powerbook had changed, preventing me from using FTP to send files to my webhost, and I had to identify the problem and fix it. So I Googled the hell out of the situation; quizzed my ISP, my webhost, the Sandvox user's group; delved with increasing desperation into the slimy innards of OS X; and still couldn't post jack.
Tonight, practically sweating from frustration (honestly, I've never had less luck with Google than I did over the last couple days, trying to figure out how to tell if my FTP port was blocked), I sent increasingly ticked-off emails to my ISP, my webhost, and the Sandvox team. Not five minutes later, the guy at my ISP responded: "I'm an idiot. Some how, the network Virus software was blocking port 20 and 21. This must have happened sometime recently, because I couldn't access FTP either. It's fixed now. Sorry about that. I swore I was just on my FTP site. I'll monitor my scanner and make sure this doesn't happen again."
I gotta say, discounting child-related medical emergencies, I've only lived through a few events that have occasioned a greater sense of relief. The wonderful sense of well-being had the same quality as the aura of contentment I get from working my email in-box down to empty or winnowing some bloated grant proposal down to half the original word count.
God. I think I need a hobby.