General Nerdiness

In this post I made about soccer nerdiness, I proved my own nerdiness by performing a tracert on Tridi's IP address in India. For the n00bs, an IP address is sort of like the phone number for your computer. Anyone online has one. My blog logs IPs when users make a post. A tracert is a trace of the route between the connection of two computers. You can perform one to any address by going to Start -> Run -> type CMD, hit OK -> type tracert and then the address (it can be an IP or web address.)

There are also online services that will give you a visual tracert so you can see a map of your path to a server. You can do this for free with the Visual Route live demo.

So, Tridi, being as nerdy as me, said he'll post from Singapore so I can compare the paths my computer takes from LA to India and LA to Singapore. I'm excited to say it was interesting!!

The route to India (IP 59.93.xx.xxx) went from LA, to NY, to London, to Frankfurt, then somehow to India. That seems to be the long way around, but that's what happens.

The route to Singapore (IP 203.120.xx.xxx) went from LA to San Jose, back to LA (wtf?) then directly to Singapore. That seems more direct.

Anyone know why the route takes a long path to India but a more direct one to Singapore?