OT - I live... sort of... was,Re: [Sca-cooks] Adamantius' email down again...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Monday, June 16, 2003, at 08:24  AM, Phlip wrote:

> Just get a message from Adamantius- his email is down again. Gunthar,
> why
> don't you put him on digest, until he's able to get back on line, try
> to
> keep from clogging his mailbox? He said he should be back up and
> running in
> about 48 hours....

Okay, in this case more like 12.

> Meantime, the rest of you, prayers, or good wishes or whatever you feel
> might be appropriate might be in order. As frustrated and angry as the
> last
> outage had him, I suspect he's going ballistic at this point.

Nah, now that I've painfully killed every last person on the planet who
cheerfully suggested that my life would be simpler and better if I were
using a Windows system (including a tech support guy in India, working
for the company that makes my router), I am in a good mood, all the
better for the vigorous homicidal exercise, _and_ able to send and
receive e-mail for the moment.

There does seem to be a problem with the network at the server end. I'm
assured by the Verizon geeks that I should be getting much higher
bandwidth for my DSL fees than I am currently getting. Apparently
following the printed instructions for a DSL modem to the letter,
without heeding nonexistent warnings, is not sufficient. I had a fairly
low bandwidth after upgrading computer and OS, and after tinkering a
bit, ended up wit' nuttin'. Last night, after dealing with 987 tech
support people, somebody finally broke the news to me that I needed a
long ethernet cable and a short phone line to the modem, rather than
the other way around. I wasn't able to resolve this until late this
afternoon, so I am now online, but still with low bandwidth (although
higher than I got with dial-up) until the promised Rudy the Repairman
shows up tomorrow. "Whitey... it looks like we're gonna have to blast!"

The moral of this story is, never let a tech support person tell you
the phone company or ISP is absolutely not at fault and it must be
something at your end, until after they've exhausted absolutely every
possibility that something is wrong at their end, BECAUSE... it's
really a pain to send e-mails from a cell phone.

Adamantius