Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



links

decay & ruin
Biosphere II
Chernobyl
dead malls
Detroit
Irving housing

got that wrong
Paleofuture.com

appropriate tech
Arduino μcontrollers
Backwoods Home
Fractal antenna

fun social media stuff


Like asecular.com
(nobody does!)

Like my brownhouse:
   repeated off-hours emergency shit storms
Friday, November 7 2014
There had been a power outage late last night, and though the power was back on this morning, something was wrong with the phone line. There was no dial tone and the DSL internet was not working. So I called Verizon about it. It's always better to call them when something really obvious is the problem (like no dial tone) because if the issue is more subtle, they have ways of putting their customers through hell (a process I only say that I am doing on my end, having already figured out the nature of what needs fixing by looking at the DSL modem's web page, a place to which it is assumed that customers are too stupid to go). Still, even with simple problems such as the absence of a dial tone, they dick their customers around by pointing out they don't have a "protection plan" and that if the problem is not in their network, they will be charged (the obvious implication being that a "protection plan" is of some value and should be purchased). Fortunately, Verizon had a slot open to come out and check the problem this afternoon. In the meantime, there was little for me to do in front of my computer except watch old episodes of To Catch a Predator. (I'd downloaded the complete archive from Bittorrent.) At some point early in the afternoon, I checked a neighbor's internet availability via their WiFi and found it was also down, but it soon came up and provided me a few minutes of connectivity before my line was fixed as well. Evidently multiple lines were knocked out and they all needed to be individually fixed. I suspect it was a fallen tree, perhaps the one that had knocked out the power last night.
Gretchen flew out of JFK this morning bound for Tampa, Florida, where she would be doing the animal rights poetry thing. Meanwhile, I didn't even bother going to the Wall Street house, as there is so little left to do there.
While the To Catch a Predator archives become monotonous after you've seen a few, there was an interesting extra in the archive download called To Catch an I.D. Thief, and it was an expertly-reported story of great complexity and suspense (even if the denouement was a bit disappointing).
At some point Marc, the guy I liaison with for that film website in Los Angeles, reached me by Skype to say that the admin tools were no longer working because there was no space left on the server (which, for some reason, is only 8 gigabytes in size, that is, smaller than a typical camera card). So I did what I always do, looking for things to throw away. For some reason, I assumed that a directory full of jpegs was automatically copied somewhere else, so I impulsively deleted them. Oops! They needed to be there to provide images for a live (though probably infrequently-visited) part of the site. It turned out it wasn't too hard for Marc to find the images and upload them again, but not before he made me feel guilty about it. It really shouldn't bother me; this site has a been a source of repeated off-hours emergency shit storms that I've been pretty effective at dealing with.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?141107

feedback
previous | next