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the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2012.01.03

We've been without home Internet service since the morning of December 23.

It seems that our local cable monopoly—Rogers Communications—has decided that its agreements with third party service providers such as ours (TekSavvy) aren't worth properly service. Teksavvy tried explaining this all during one of the other outages to hit Toronto in 2011 but given my long history in IT I'm not impressed. If it's happening repeatedly, the incident response system (and the business arrangement between the two firms) needs some serious fixing.

As it turned out, something went wrong with the webserver for emuu.net and I couldn't fix it for at least two days. That's on top of not being able to chat with anybody via Skype on New Year's, missing the NHK TV special (which my wife had been looking forward to for months) and generally causing havoc. I wound up using my X'mas gift—an Amazon kindle with 3G capability—to keep us online. Bizarrely, this 'experimental' use of an e-reader worked well enough that I was able to make some purchases, find a nice restaurant for a New Year's meal, etc.

One of my purchases, and I'm not kidding, was a Mac- and Wintel- compatible USB 56k modem. Remember those? They still exist, as does the USRobotics brand. Next time, we won't be caught quite this flat-footed.

rand()m quote

If I had my life to live over, I'd try to make more mistakes next time. I would relax, I would limber up, I would be crazier than I've been on this trip. I know very few things I'd take seriously any more. I'd certainly be less hygenic... I would take more chances, I would take more trips, I would scale more mountains, I would swim more rivers, and I would watch more sunsets. I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans. I would have more actual troubles and fewer imaginary ones. Oh, I've had my moments, and if I had to do it all over again, I'd have many more of them, in fact I'd try not to have anything else, just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead of my day. If I had it to do all over again, I'd travel lighter, much lighter than I have. I would start barefoot earlier in the spring, and I'd stay that way later in the fall. And I would ride more merry-go-rounds, and catch more gold rings, and greet more people and pick more flowers and dance more often. If I had it to do all over again - but you see, I don't.

—Jorge Luis Borges