I received about a dozen inquiries yesterday and this morning asking if our
web pages had gone off-line again. The answer is no, but that doesn't
necessarily mean you can reach them -- at least not without an explanation.

As many of you know, we switched to Qwest as our web hosting service, simply
to avoid what happened a few months ago: our ISP suddenly and unexpectedly
went out of business, with absolutely no forewarning. By moving to Qwest, we
could be assured that that situation would never again recur.

Although Qwest is a large company, they went out of their way to get us up
and running almost immediately, linking in our two primary web addresses:

     www.aics-research.com
     aics-research.com

and I couldn't have been happier.

However, yesterday, for reasons associated with someone's decision at Qwest
to support only addresses that comply with RFC XXX of the W3C consortium,
they decided that they will no longer support any web address that doesn't
start with the "www". They gave us no forewarning of that decision. They
simply killed the "aics-research.com" DNS resolution sometime yesterday
afternoon.

All of the web pages are still reachable. You just have to be sure now to put
a "www" in front of the address. Apparently many of you have our address in
your browser's history file (or have linked web pages) without the "www" and
are relying on that form of the address -- and that's how you got your
"failures to find" the web pages you were looking for.

This change also affects some of our internal web pages, but I'll fix those
immediately. In the interim, Qwest has invited me to write them a letter
outlining my complaints with this new policy. I'll do that as soon as I calm
down :-).

Wirt Atmar