Weblog: Jun 2001

The DSL "self-install kit" that I'd been waiting for finally arrived, but I'll have to wait til tomorrow for Speakeasy to get back to me about a couple oversights. I'll write up a page on the full fiasco in a few days; hopefully in a good mood because DSL will be working and I will have resumed my Internet work and caught up on the high-bandwidth emailing I need to do. (Simply posting an update to this Web page without my usual connectivity takes an involved 10-minute procedure involving two home computers and the swapping of PCMCIA cards halfway through, as opposed to my normal 10-second procedure that consists of invoking two commands. Not high-bandwidth.)

In other news, I sat down outside with the laptop and banged out another Web page I've been meaning to write for ages, Etiquette for Nonconsensual Photography. (The connotations of "nonconsensual" are intended.)

My Ericsson LX588 cellphone passed away suddenly a few days ago, and I'm not going to replace it. I'd gotten caught in heavy rain, with laptop, the new digital camera, and cellphone all in a fairly watertight leather shoulder bag. I ran a hair-dryer over all three electronic devices when I got home, just in case there was any condensation. Laptop and digcam are perfectly fine, but the cellphone refused to work when I plugged the battery back in. The AT&T wireless phone warranty people flipped out when they heard that the phone might've been exposed to moisture — both the rep and her supervisor swore up and down that they couldn't possibly allow me to send the phone back to them, now that they have a suspicion that it might've been exposed to moisture. I decided it wasn't worth my time to force them to accept the phone back, so I'm just going to cancel my cellphone service. I don't think the Ericsson phone should've died like it did, and this particular phone has several obvious engineering flaws I'd noticed before, so if I get a free hour, I'm going to send the phone corpse and a letter to Ericsson HQ. Oh, one thing I did learn from the AT&T rep's script: when you say that the phone might've been exposed to water, the rep has you look at and describe the battery recharging terminals. I assume they're looking for oxidation or leakage of some kind, though conspiracy theorists might wonder if the phone is designed to have a telltale moisture exposure indicator.

I never received any email sent to me during first four days of June, and email since then has been spotty, so phone or re-email me now if I didn't reply to your email before. Speakeasy.net, the DSL provider I've recommended to numerous people in the past, majorly screwed up, in a manner that I hadn't expected from them. This has already cost me a person-week just diagnosing the problem, setting up temporary services, trying to recover from lost emails, etc. I'll be putting up a Web page on the Speakeasy.net fiasco later, the exact tone of which will be affected by how well they perform in the next couple days. Also, I'd been using the nwv@acm.org forwarding address to make it easier to recover from DSL outages, but the ACM forwarder no longer works as well as it used to, so I'm at least temporarily making nwv@neilvandyke.org my primary address until this mess gets sorted out. By now, DNS zone with the MX record pointing to a Pair.com domain-hosting server should've propagated to a server near you.

Oh, I'm finally uploading a little page I wrote on the 2nd: Coping With Vegetarians.

My home ADSL link has been down since Friday 8:05pm EDT, and I'm not receiving email til it's back, so hopefully Speakeasy (who I'm normally pleased with) can diagnose the problem quickly. Though you probably won't see this weblog entry before the DSL is back up.

I took advantage of a slow, rainy, connectivityless Saturday morning to write up a page I've been meaning to for awhile: Coping With Vegetarians.