DoS: Death of Superstar

This is about the late Michael Jackson, memory, and a few other things. I am old enough to remember the Jackson Five: their early hits, their TV cartoon show. Let’s review:

That means I’m more than old enough to remember when DOS stood for Disk Operating System. Nowadays, I think of those three letters as denoting a denial-of-service attack.

Some sites, including Google, suspected that they were under a DoS attack recently, when what was really going on was the result of a different kind of DoS: the Death of Superstar Michael Jackson. I think that he was a very talented performer, but his work was never personally important to me. (I’ll leave his own personal life alone.)

I remember seeing him live in the south of France, where I lived from 1987-89. It was my then-girlfriend’s idea/insistence that we go. It was more her thing than mine, although I was impressed by the show he put on. I also remember illustrious keyboard player Greg Phillinganes being in the band.

Doing some web research, I see that it must have been part of the Bad tour. But the only list of dates for that tour that I can find shows only two French dates, both in Paris.

Is my memory playing tricks on me? Two things make me believe that it isn’t, and that I really did see MJ. First, I see open dates both immediately before and immediately after the Paris shows, so it’s logistically plausible that there were some other French dates. Second, I do remember Greg Phillinganes was in the band – I recognized his name from his work with other musicians – and that checks out.

Anyway, RIP MJ. We’ll always have Nice, or wherever it was.

WordPress.com Denial of Service

InfoWorld reports that WordPress.com, which hosts this and many other blogs, suffered a DoS (denial-of-service) attack that began Saturday and was still preventing users from logging in or posting to their blogs on Tuesday. But the same article states that “WordPress.com users were notified via e-mail about the DoS attack.” I certainly wasn’t. Neither were other bloggers.

I’d like to see a post on the WordPress.com blog about this. A short acknowledgment that it happened would be better than nothing. Including a reminder that WordPress.com has rarely been down since it launched would be appropriate.