We’re used to the occasional brief Internet outage, but this one was ridiculous. Our phone company is a series of tin cans connected by string, and it seems that a vole must have chewed through one of the strings. They had to order a new piece of twine all the way from China.
Seriously: There was a thunderstorm on Monday evening. There were no lightning strikes anywhere close to us, and the rain had already stopped when the electricity flickered off for about four seconds. When it came back on, the Intercloud was gone. And it stayed gone for more than two days. The phone company spent those two days nailing its foot to the floor so it could run around in circles more efficiently.
Many thanks to Henrik for putting up a notice and approving comments while we were indisposed.
It will take a while to get back up to normal speed. I have a lot of email to go through, but I’ll try to put up a news feed tonight.
The Intercloud is an entity that has the divine property of seeing everything you do and recording it in the Thoughtcrimes Repository in Utah; see
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
By patronizing the Intercloud as the Holy Jinn of Allah, you are committing _shirk_. Maybe this outage was a warning from Allah.
That’s always my first thought. My second thought is usually a recognition that the phone company is our only provider. Proving again the advantages of competition for keeping a business on its toes.
Good to see you back online.
Voles, yet, no less…. Interesting critters-similar to our western gophers here in the Centennial state. As a young lad, you could get a dime for the front legs or other proof of their demise at the county agent’s office. I suspect PETA would deliver the proverbial bovine over that transaction these days. Good to see ya back at the keyboard, Baron…!!
-West out
here you get 50.00 for a coyote – or some essential body part thereof. There is a grand total of 3,000.00 set aside for this project annually and each year and it is tapped out. You have to get a special license, iirc. But that’s not to say there aren’t private arrangements with those who raise farm animals.
I can sympathize with the farmers’ plight; however, it is a blessing to see far fewer wild dog packs passing through. And without coyotes, the deer and small black bears would be breaking the door down for dinner.
I left Phoenix for Western NC in late July due to my dad’s illness and subsequent passing and am currently staying with my stepmother at their place in a small town between Greenville/Spartanburg SC and Asheville NC. The DSL here is very erratic, summer thunderstorms knock it off line all the time and I am constantly having to reboot the modem.
I always think about you and Dymphna whenever I visit here.
Very different weather between Phoenix and the mountain ridges in the western part of that area. We could use some of Phoenix’s dry heat. As you say, usually we can just reboot. This time, it was a step further back. What do they call those boxes? Servers? The incident before this one knocked out 56 customers but that was a severe storm. This one was brief, not even much sturm and drang.
Your poor dad must have had a rough time of it; good that you could be there. No matter how old we are, we’re never prepared for the death of a parent. All of a sudden we’re the point man.
When our son wants a taste of city life he drives down to Asheville.
I will never take my light speed FIOS for granted ever again. I know that Verizon lost money bringing it to our humble little neighborhood but we enjoy reaping the benefits. May I suggest satellite service? Should the tin cup have a spot for it?
We had a satellite service. In addition to being expensive and unreliable, it had a bug called “rain fade”. This meant that a rain shower or thunderstorm would render it inoperative.
The phone company version is cheaper and far more reliable, at least until now. Since there were only eight people put out by this, they didn’t feel our pain – they kept losing our trouble ticket so that each time the B called, they promised to have it done ‘in a few days. But this must be its beta version?
The immediate attention that was called for was most likely not cost effective. I am a bus. admin. student so I know how this stuff works, mores the pity.
So gates of Vienna is truly the voice of one crying in the wilderness.