I also am not able to get the feeds via itunes... same error... and when i go to the main page, and click on the "main podcast feed" button, i get a 404.
Click, hum.
The huge grey escape pod rss feed moved silently through the black void. It was traveling at fabulous, breathtaking speed, yet appeared, against the glimmering background of a billion distant stars to be moving not at all. It was just one dark speck frozen against an infinite granularity of brilliant night.
On board the podcast, everything was as it had been for millenia, deeply dark and silent.
Click, hum.
At least, almost everything.
Click, click, hum.
Click, hum, click, hum, click, hum.
Click, click, click, click, click, hum.
Hmmm.
A low-level supervising program woke up a slightly higher-level supervising program deep in the podcast's semisomnolent cyberbrain and reported to it that whenever it went _click_ all it got was a _hum._
The higher-level supervising program asked it what it was supposed to get, and the low-level supervising program said that it couldn't remember what it was meant to get, exactly, but thought it was probably more of a sort of distant satisfied sigh, wasn't it? It didn't know what this hum was. Click, hum, click, hum. That was all it was getting.
The higher-level supervising program considered this and didn't like it. It asked the low-level supervising program what exactly it was supervising and the low-level supervising program said it couldn't remember that either, just that it was something that was meant to go click, sigh every ten years or so, which usually happened without fail. It had tried to consult its error look-up table but couldn't find it, which was why it had alerted the higher-level supervising program of the problem.
The higher-level supervising program went to consult one of its own look-up tables to find out what the low-level supervising program was meant to be supervising.
It couldn't find the look-up table.
Odd.
It looked again. All it got was an error message. It tried to look up the error message in its error message look-up table and couldn't find that either. It allowed a couple of nanoseconds to go by while it went through all this again. Then it woke up its sector function supervisor.
The sector function supervisor hit immediate problems. It called its supervising agent, which hit problems too. Within a few millionths of a second virtual circuits that had lain dormant, some for years, some for centuries, were flaring into life throughout the entire Escape Artists website. Something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong, but none of the supervising programs could tell what it was. At every level, vital instructions were missing, and the instructions about what to do in the event of discovering that vital instructions were missing, were also missing.
Small modules of software--agents--surged through the logical pathways, grouping, consulting, regrouping. They quickly established that the website's memory, all the way back to its central mission module, was in tatters. No amount of interrogation could determine what it was that had happened. Even the central mission module itself seemed to be damaged.
This made the whole problem very simple to deal with, in fact. Replace the central mission module. There was another one, a backup, an exact duplicate of the original. It had to be physically replaced because, for safety reasons, there was no link whatsoever between the original and its backup. Once the central mission module was replaced it could itself supervise the reconstruction of the rest of the system in every detail, and all would be well.
Robots were instructed to bring the backup central mission module from the shielded strong room, where they guarded it, to the website's logic chamber for installation.
This involved the lengthy exchange of emergency codes and protocols as the robots interrogated the agents as to the authenticity of the instructions. At last the robots were satisfied that all the procedures were correct. They unpacked the backup central mission module from its storage housing, carried it out of the storage chamber, fell out of the server and went spinning off into the void.
This provided the first major clue as to what it was that was wrong.
Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the website's server. The website had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the server's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the server had been hit by a meteorite.
....
{paraphrased from "mostly harmless," by Douglas Adams.}
