I never thought about DNS servers. Yeah, why would I huh?

After all this http://s8809162.onlinehome.us/ business though (the default name of my site), I got annoyed with long names and decided to get http://www.LukeMa.net/ as my domain. 1and1, my host, lets me get a domain name for $5.99, and the package includes a whole bunch of options, including 50 subdomains. Cool.

So I sign up for lukema.net and set everything up. It tells me the domain is ready but I still can't get to it. Turns out the reason is that lukema.net hasn't had time to propagate to all the DNS servers.

I don't think about this normally. You type in an address, it works. The association with site and address has always been complete for me. But after thinking about propagation, I realize how much of the web, or actually everything presentable (from a laptop to an academic paper), has nitty-gritty behind it. And most of the time, it's not as idealized as the presentation makes it out to be. Still, it's amazing that despite the imperfections, humans have come up with some pretty amazing (and arguably exquisitely pointless) things. I'm typing on a wonderful piece of it right now.