For the last 3 weeks I've found it impossible to connect to ubuntu's sites.
whether it's launchpad, or the repositories, or the wiki, the pages just won't load.

Ive tried traceroute on this problem and consistently it gets as far as
indium.canonical.com 91.189.88.10 followed by a big string of "no reply".

There's a long pause after it hits canonical-gw.datahop.net 195.72.129.70 which is next to the last site in the chain.

has anybody else been experiencing this?

Must be something local to you - I just pulled the 64-bit Gutsy Beta without incident.
Made it all the way across the Pacific.

Something local to me that AFAIK only affects one remote server would have to be extremely arcane. IE I connected to this forum & several other sites with no problems. Meanwhile canonical is still #NA.

As previously stated, and still currently:
*****
Ive tried traceroute on this problem and consistently it gets as far as
indium.canonical.com 91.189.88.10 followed by a big string of "no reply".
*****

Which implies to me that the connection (drops/is rejected) at the canonical server.

I am starting to have suspicions that it might be related to time-outs and the fact that, unlike you, ( "I just pulled the 64-bit Gutsy Beta without incident.") I'm using a dial-up connection. This suspicion is re-enforced by the fact that I was able to make a pretty-much-useless connection to launchpad using lynx via a telnet session on my shell account. This would mean that I'm being pressured to upgrade to dsl - and if I was the type that gave in to market pressure, I'd be sitting here wondering what I'd done to make windows crash ;}. My current conditions preclude that solution anyway.

So the question becomes "is anybody out there able to the canonical sites (ubuntu.org, launchpad, etc.) via a dial-up connection.?"

While I'm at it, any old farts out there that know if TIA is still around?