When you want to phone a friend, you could type their number into the phone and press the call button, but these days you’re much more likely to find your friend’s name in the Contacts app and click the button there. The phone will look up the number for you and make the call. Much the same thing happens when you visit a website. You could type the IP address of the website into your browser’s search bar, but no-one does this – instead, you type in the website’s name and the browser looks up the unknown and unmemorable IP address for you. There is one difference, though, between making a phone call and visiting a website: your list of contacts is on your phone, the Internet directory is out there in the cloud somewhere. If your friend changes their phone number, you can just update it on your phone. If your favourite website moves to another server, the site administrators have to update the Domain Name System holding the website directory. And that’s not quite so straightforward.

As the site administrator, the Crotchety Blogger had to redirect the domain name of our local U3A to a new website last week. This involved updating the DNS records held on our domain (which only I had the authority to do) and some magic at the server hosting the new website (which only an administrator at the new server’s domain could do). This promised to be an exciting process, not least because it is not something I know much about. So we organised a three-way Zoom meeting: a technical expert to guide me at this end, the admin guy at the remote end, and myself to be the typing fingers controlled by the brains at either end.

I won’t bore you with the details of that 1 hour 40 minute Zoom meeting. Suffice it to say that, with one brief stumble, we achieved our objective: the domain name of our U3A now points to a shiny new website. In celebration of that small victory, I thought I’d choose some music related to ‘redirection’ for this week’s blog post and, after some haphazard searching, an album called Directions peeped out from the online undergrowth.

If I know but little about the Domain Name System and website configuration, I know even less about Miles Davis. Kind of Blue is the only one of his 60 studio albums in my collection. But his influence seems to be everywhere. His name keeps cropping up in comments by the artists I admire and reviews of their work. A piece on the man called “the Picasso of jazz” is long overdue in these pages. Here, then, is a small pointer to perhaps the most influential jazz musician of the late 40s through to his death in 1991. If anyone reading this hasn’t made even a passing acquaintance with the famed trumpeter and composer, I can only suggest you ask for directions to the giants of jazz. Miles Davis won’t be far away.