Lift Up Your Hearts!

Today our computer network stopped working.

I needed to access a file on our laptop from our Windows 98 machine.  Nothing.  Nada.  The helpful message from Windows told me the nework was unavailable and I should contact my network administrator.  Hello, that's me, and neither I nor me had any clue.  Even more helpfully it told me to start the network troubleshooter, which then presented me with a totally blank screen.  Apparently it had no more clue than me or I.  For the record, Porter was equally stumped, though he manfully plowed through our home networking book for a while.

Of course we tried the Universal Cure for Computer Problems:  rebooting both machines, and even rebooting the router, although our connection to the Internet was still working fine.  Ya never know with computer problems.  But no dice.

Figuring the problem might have been caused by some Microsoft updates we had installed today (since everything had worked fine yesterday), I contemplated the other Computer Panacea:  a System Restore.  But it was dinner time, and then we watched Annie Hall, which movie left me just disoriented enough to be able to accept the absurd fact that when I returned to the computer the network was working cheerfully, just as if it had not stubbornly hidden itself all day.  We had not done a System Restore (only contemplated it), we had not rebooted, we had done nothing but eat and watch a movie.

When the problem first became apparent, Porter asked me what I'd done to fix the problem last time it occurred.  I was somewhat embarrassed to discovered that I had not made a note of the solution.

Now I know why.

How many times do I have to be taught that technology, while useful, even delightful at times, is not to be depended on?  I wonder if electronic equipment works better in Switzerland, where trains and trams are so dependable that a three-minute deviation from schedule is a notable occurrence?

Once again, I picked up my PDA to find it had lost everything.  This is the third time that has happened in about a year an a half, and I think it's related to alarms going off repeatedly when I'm not aware of them.  I'd love to shut off the alarms on the handheld device, but I can't do that without removing them from the desktop, which is where I really need them.  But this time surprised me, because last I knew there was still plenty of life in the batteries.

Oh, well—I had a backup and only lost a couple of pieces of data.  It would be helpful if I knew which data I'd lost, but I'll manage.  At least this time I was home and could restore the data quickly—the first time I was on vacation and could do nothing till my return.  That's when I learned to keep key information on paper when I travel!

Our nifty electronic devices are still too useful for me to give them up altogether, but it's good to be reminded now and then of the importance of backups and of Plans B.  Of more concern is our similar dependence on fallible sources of heat, light, water, food, transportation, and other basic necessities, but that's another issue and much harder to resolve.

This morning I did as I usually do several times a day—I went to Google to perform an Internet search.  This time the front page informed me that Google is now celebrating its ninth birthday.

I'm not sure what to think about that.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. 

If you think about that too much, you can find yourself ranking it among the world's most terrifying statements.  Not that it in any way diminishes the value Google and other search engines have added to our lives.  But whether for good or for ill, the Internet and Google have wrought radical changes.  I'm old enough for nine years to seem but an instant, and find it hard to believe the pre-Google world was less than a decade ago.

For those of you who have been following our computer woes (here and here), this is where we are now.  In limbo.

The very good news  A friend lent us his device that turns an internal hard drive into an external, usb device, and we were able to copy the data to a new one-terabyte backup drive.  (Time out for a sigh of amazement.  One terabyte?  We used to do our backups on 5 1/4 inch floppies with a capacity of 110 kilobytes.)  Losing the hard drive would not have been a total disaster, as I have several layers of backup, but they are a bit spotty and it was really, really nice to have access to the files as I had left them the night before all this started.

The related bad news  What's the point of having backed up the whole C drive instead of just my own data, if one can't transfer all that information over to a new machine?  Apparently the way the Windows Registry works, all the programs will have to be reinstalled anyway—which of course means not only a lot of work but that I lose whatever came preinstalled with the original machine.  Oh for the days when they gave you the original disks—even for the operating system—when you bought a computer!  I guess that will save me backup space from now on, unless someone can tell me there's reason for backing up anything other than my personal files.

The lovely news  We've been studying The Five Love Languages in a class at church.  Porter has been exhibiting "Acts of Service" at a great rate with regard to this computer problem:  making phone calls, doing Internet searches, driving across down....

The very frustrating news  The Internet search for the appropriate motherboard was fruitless.  According to the people Porter talked to, that board is very popular right now; many people are trying to find it.  I wonder if it had an expiration date and everyone's is going bad?  Like sour milk or stale bread?  Getting anything other than the correct motherboard would require getting a new case for the machine and kludging things together, as the Gateway motherboard is not a standard configuration.

The absolutely ridiculous customer "support" news So Porter broke down and called Gateway to see how much an out-of-warranty repair would cost.  Guess what?  Not only will Gateway not sell the necessary parts, they won't do out-of-warranty repairs themselves!  I guess one is supposed to buy a new computer, but I don't see how that helps Gateway, since there's no way I'm buying another computer from them...unless all the major companies are in collusion.  But I'm not a conspiracy theorist—yet.

The temporarily hopeful news  The Gateway tech recommended a website for finding the correct motherboard.  It was one Porter had found, and indeed they had the right board, but it was "out of stock."  Buoyed by the Gateway recommendation, Porter called the company, which appeared to be helpful.  Yes, that board was out of stock and they didn't know when if ever they would get it again.  It was a very hot item, and they had another Gateway motherboard that was similar which several people had bought instead of the correct one.  We could buy that and try it out, returning it if it didn't work—they'd even waive the normal 15% restocking fee.  So Porter ordered one ($200) and we had a "party" at the home of the above-mentioned friend who lent us his hard drive enclosure.  Now this is a guy whose life is in large part computers, both his vocation and his avocation.  He had built every one of the uncountable computers in his house, except for the castoffs he as adopted, and I suspect he's done a lot to modify them, as well.  So it was encouraging to see him and Porter settle down to installing the new motherboard.

The discouraging news  At first it went well, thanks to our friend having some spare parts, such as ribbon cable, that had somehow been lost while the machine was at the repair shop :( , and despite the fact that the motherboard came with absolutely no documentation at all, and looked as if it is used, not new.  :(  :(  But it was a case of "almosts."  The board doesn't quite fit so some of the ports wouldn't work.  One capacitor is too tall, so the heat sink doesn't quite line up, so they ahd to monitor the CPU temperature while working.  If it ever works, we'll have to rout out the heat sink some.  But we didn't get that far.  After much twiddling, Windows boots!  Sort of.  But only in safe mode; otherwise it hangs.  After much effort and frustration, they gave up and we went to dinner.  So that's where it stands now:  in our living room, in pieces.

The dilemma  So what do we do now?

• Pour a lot of time and energy into trying to get Windows working, followed by making all sorts of kludges to get other things to fit/work, and (probably) reinstalling all my programs?
• Pay to send the motherboard back and hope we get some of our $200 returned?
• Buy an inexpensive new computer with space for good working parts (e.g. DVD drives, hard drive) from the old machine?  Easier said than done—the "basic" computers I've looked at tend not to have a lot of expansion space.
• Invest (again!) in a fancy desktop computer and hope this one lasts longer?
• Take advantage of the opportunity to get a new laptop and hope it lasts?
• Give it to Jon as a Christmas present?  After all, it has a (probably) working motherboard, a DVD read drive, a DVD write drive (both very nice), a 250MB hard drive, a high-speed, dual-core Athelon processor, a GB of memory, and a few other bells and whistles. (My suggestion)
• Don't give it to Jon, as a Christmas present for Heather.  (Janet's suggestion)
• Use it as a boat anchor.  (Porter's suggestion)

The interim solution I'm using our (old) laptop, having devised a scheme for keeping large quantities of data on the Maxtor 60G portable hard drive I take with me when travelling.  The immediate reason for this is that the laptop's hard drive capacity is only 20GB (actually less) which is woefully insufficient to hold my data alone—and Porter and I share this machine.  I think I like the idea, and plan to continue using it even when/if we get another machine, because then I won't have to worry about synchronizing data when we travel.  The interim solution is actually working fairly well, my primary frustrations being (1) I can't burn CD's or DVD's; (2) I can't read DVD's; (3) there are only two USB ports, and (4) the USB ports are old and slow—not only does data transfer take forever, but I'm heartily sick of having Windows tell me, every time I plug in a device, that it would peform faster if only I had a USB 2 port, when it knows quite well that I don't.

Stay tuned.  I believe it's time to write my friend Bill McCollum a letter.  It's a little early for Christmas cards, but I think he's due one in his capacity as Florida's Attorney General.  I need to vent about Gateway to someone besides my faithful, but small, blog audience. 

What would you think if you bought a top-of-the-line piece of equipment, and 19 months later—seven months out of warranty—it completely stopped working?  I wouldn't be happy even if it were a $25 item.

What if it cost over $1000—would you be a bit annoyed?  What if it was a piece of equipment necessary for much of the work you do?

But hey, sometimes things happen.  That's what repair shops are for.

But what if the manufacturer refuses to sell you the part you need to make the repair?

We've been loyal Gateway Computer fans for many long years; I think we've had five of them all told.  Cow boxes = excitement around here!

Nevermore.

In January of 2006 we bought our latest Gateway, a lovely high speed machine with lots of bells and whistles.  We did not opt for the extended warranty, since we've never had a bit of trouble with any of our Gateways—we only replaced them when they grew hopelessly out of date.   It was, indeed, a lovely machine, and did everything it promised.

Everything except last.

As I've written, last Monday it entered the machine-equivalent of a Persistent Vegetative State.  After trying several tricks, none of which did any good, we took it to a computer emergency room.  Diagnosis:  a failed motherboard.  If we would get a new Gateway motherboard, they would gladly replace it and get us up and running again.

Good news?  I thought so.  I mean, it was going to cost money, but that's life.  We spent $500 in car repairs over the last two weeks, too.  I was just glad that the diagnosis was not:  Your hard drive crashed and you've lost all your data.

I did think it was a little funny that the repair guy said we had to order the motherboard.  But now I know why.  Gateway doesn't sell them!  If your computer is under warranty, they'll fix it, but otherwise you're on your own.  The tech's recommendation?  "Google it."  Find a motherboard somewhere in cyberspace.  He even kindly provided the specs.

What kind of company won't sell replacement parts for a high-end, critical machine that's less than two years old???

Porter went down to Best Buy to ask them what they do when someone brings in such a machine under their extended warranty.  Um, guess what?  They Google it.  They dig around, looking for someone with the right Gateway motherboard to sell.

Je ne comprends pas!

What I do know is that I need to RETHINK.  How can I take advantage of what computers have to offer—they wouldn't be so important to me if they didn't have a lot of value to add—without being so dependent on them?  Do I go back to paper for critical information?

Should we get two of everything, to have a backup?  We sort of had that—our older Gateway still works, mostly.  But it's a Windows 98 machine with some funny quirks, and it lacks the power to do what I want to do.  So for backup purposes it's not really good enough.

Do I transfer as much as possible of my work to the Internet?  That's not possible with much of what I do, but if I used GMail I'd at least not lose e-mail messages when something like this happens.  That makes me a bit nervous, having all my e-mails stored elsewhere—but having them on my own machine didn't work out too well this time.

Any ideas?

Oh, and if I haven't answered an e-mail you sent me before last Monday, I'm probably not deliberatly ignoring it.  I just can't get to it....

Our friend Chris, the engineer who eschews e-mail and still uses a paper organizer, is fond of saying, "Just call me Ned."  I'm not ready to go that far, but his point of view is currently looking a little more reasonable.

After much internal debate, Porter decided to invest in an air card, a device that plugs into his computer and allows him to connect to the Internet from anywhere.  Well, make that anywhere with Cingular—oops, I mean the New AT&T—cellular service.  Unfortunately, that excludes some important locations, like Granby, Connecticut.  But it does include a great many places.  I tried it out on the way home from the airport a few days ago, and only lost service once on the 45-minute ride, and that for no more than a second.  The speed is not as fast as our normal broadband connection, but it's really not bad, especially if you use the accelerator option, which reduces the quality (and thus the downloading time) of images.

I foresee several uses of this new device in addition to the obvious business benefits that were the excuse for its purchase.  The one that is emblazoned in large letters at the present time, however, is that the major lightning strike of about an hour ago, which took out our cable connection, has not left us without Internet and phone service.  Ironically, I only two days ago I filled out a survey stating that Bright House's cable service has been very reliable and its customer service fine.  I still don't fault the cable service—a lightning strike is bound to wreak havoc.  But Bright House customer service can offer us help no sooner than next Tuesday!  That really is unaccepable.  If they were only offering cable TV service, that would be one thing, but when people are depending on you for Internet and phone service—especially phone service!—you need to be more attentive to repairs.

So I'm very grateful for our backup.  Thanks to the air card, we not only have Internet access, but were able to connect to CallVantage and have our phone calls forwarded to Porter's cell phone.

With this coming on top of my own computer being in the shop—status currently unknown—I'm once again feeling a little nervous about our dependence on technology.  There should always be a Plan B—and probably C, D, and E as well.

Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." (James 4:13-15)

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
(Robert Burns, To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough)

I had plans for this week.

They did not include dealing with a computer that refuses to awaken from sleep. My alarm clock went of at 5:15 this morning, and I was up and about within seconds. Not so my computer.

Last night there was no hint of problem, not the slightest suggestion that something was not entirely well. I put the machine into sleep mode, as I often do if time is short in the morning. When I awoke and stumbled into my office, I pressed a key, as usual, to bring up the computer, then left the room for a few minutes. When I returned, the first thing I noticed was that the whirring noise of the fan was still loud, as it is when the machine is just waking, or booting. The second thing was that there was no display. I played with turning the display on and off, receiving only a brief "no signal" message before it went blank again, then turned the compujter off. To do that I had to hold the power button in several seconds, which is never a good sign. Turning the machine on again resulted in the same scenario. The hard drive light comes on for a while, but there are no associated, familiar sounds of disk access, and soon all I'm left with is a power light that blinks on and off, as it does while asleep. Only it won't wake up. There was a time when I could tell what my machine was saying to me by looking at its lights, but back then I had dozens to work with, not just one. This one seems to be saying no more than "On Strike."

So I turned to my Gateway manual. Maintaining and Troubleshooting Your PC. That sounds promising. Problem: The computer will not start up. Probably cause: The computer isnot connected to an AC outlet. Wow. That was helpful.

It didn't get any better after that. I found the System Restoration CD's, which might be useful at some point, but the manual cheerfully refers me to the on-screen information for instructions.

I suppose the next step is a reorganization of my office—which is sadly needed, though it wasn't highest on my priority list for the week—in hopes of finding the Boot Disk I'm pretty sure I made when I installed Norton SystemWorks. The only reason I say "pretty sure" instead of being certain is that I've installed Norton so many times on so many machines, they all run together in my mind, and at the moment all I can find are 3.5 inch floppy disk boot CD's, which I know is wrong because this machine doesn't have a floppy drive. So now I have to figure out where the "safe place" is that I decided to store it.

Then maybe I'll take the cover off the computer and see if anything looks as if it has worked loose. That would be a nice, easy fix.

Somewhere along the line I'll probably give my favorite Lime Daley Support Tech a call, not so much because I expect him to be able to do anything long distance, but in hopes he'll have some good ideas.

I believe my important files are reasonably well backed up, though I know I'm behind on mail backups. Ironically, I held the external backup drive in my hand last night, but decided it was too late to start a backup at that point. Never put off till tomorrow.... One thing I know: If and when I get out of this mess, I should go out and buy another backup drive, because one of the reasons I've been doing partial rather than compete backups is that one 500G drive is not adequate for backing up four machines.

But this post is ample evidence that I'd rather whine about problems then work on them, so I think the first thing I'll do is bury my head in the sand for a while. Eat breakfast. Work on problems of a different nature, such as the need to take the car to the mechanic because the rear A/C no longer works....

Man proposes; God disposes.

Readily acknowledging that God's plans for me this week are by definition better than mine, I nonetheless hope they include a rapid and complete recovery from this mess. As catastrophes go, even severe computer problems are not very high on the list, even for someone who depends on a computer as much as I do. It's always good to pause to be thankful for all that is going right. And I'm grateful for the laptop. Event though the bulk of my work is on the main machine, I'd be panicking a lot more if I didn't have this to keep me in touch with the world and some of my most critical data.

Hmmm, perhaps this is a warning to step up my hurricane preparations....

I really have little right to complain about Windows Media Player as I'm only in the beginning stages of trying to understand it.  Jon and Heather gave me a great gift recently:  a 40G mp3 player which I plan to integrate into our stereo system as an N-disk CD changer, where N is a very large number.  How lazy can you get?  But I know I will take much better advantage of our large CD collection when I don't have to go to all the bother of actually replacing the CD in the player.  This gift was a delightful surprise, not only because it's something I've been thinking about for a long time but hadn't done anything about, but especially because I didn't have to do the shopping.  :)

To my even greater delight, Jon altered the firmware so that I can see the device on my computer directly through Windows Explorer (which, to show my age, I occasionally call "File Manager") instead of through the mediation of Windows Media Player.  But I like WMP for playing CD's, so I decided to try to figure out how to use its Library feature.

I haven't tried hard enough to give up yet.  But I'm allowing myself to indulge in a grumble:  Why does it have to be so non-intuitive?  I know I've been spoiled.  One used to need to read the manual thoroughly before being able to use software; now the interface is usually so accommodating it takes special effort even to find a manual.  I've been able to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft applications pretty much out of the box, so I was expecting more of Media Player.

What I can't get my head around is how it is organized, and how it works.  It scans my computer for audio files automatically, thereby picking up all sorts of files I don't want in the Library, but won't allow me to add a specific file manually.  If I drag a file from Explorer into WMP, I can't add it directly to the library—it just plays.  Somehow the act of playing automatically adds things to the Library, but what a strange way to accomplish a simple task.  When I change data from within WMP it seems to change the file sometimes, but not others.  I changed the name of an album in WMP, but that change did not affect the name I saw in Explorer, and vice versa.  I tried deleting the album from the Library, then adding it again, hoping it would pick up the right name, but that only worked if I checked the option, "Add files previously deleted from Library"—and that picked up the old file name, not the new.  And there are other identifiers, such as "genre," which are somehow associated with the file itself—if I copy it manually to the mp3 player, not using the WMP Sync function, the data is there—but I haven't yet figured a way to access (and change) it from Explorer.  I think I'd rather use WMP—it has some nice editing features—but don't want to spend a lot of time making changes only to see them undone when I rearrange my files, which is what happened once already.

Oh well, I'm not asking for answers here; I'm going to stumble along in my usual way—though I've already found out that the Help file answers questions I don't have more than questions I do, such as "How can you make something that should be as simple as changing a file and make it so complicated?"  No doubt once I'm familiar with the system I'll laugh at my baby steps, but right now it's rather like the first stages of learning Japanese, when I could hardly distinguish one sound from another.  I need a "Press 1 for English" button.

As one who habitually indulges in catastrophism, I appreciated this essay by John Stackhouse on why people don't get back to us right away when we communicate.  I'm not usually upset when people don't answer e-mails immediately, because if everyone answered e-mails immediately, we'd get sucked into in a destructive vortex.  However, I confess to what might be an inordinate desire for blog comments; my hope for many of my posts is that they will be discussion-starters, and with any of them it's nice to know that someone is at least reading my offerings.  What's more, there are certain blogs I check frequently, looking for information, commentary, and discussion, and it's hard not to be disappointed when nothing new is forthcoming. (I'm not just referring to my own family's blogs, though of course they are the most important and most eagerly sought-after.)

My resigned sigh of "Everyone is too busy actually living life to write about it" is much more accurate than my joking, "Nobody loves me."    Perhaps the most useful response, however, is to remember the times I'm slow at responding to e-mails, or fail to make a comment on a post I like, or to acknowledge a comment on my own blog—as well as the days I allow to pass without providing a new post for my own readers.  In my own case I know there are good reasons for my lack of communication.  Okay, so some of the reasons aren't really all that good—but none is malicious.

Assuming the best rather than the worst sounds like a far happier and healthier approach to all of life.

Our laptop has been used in a docking station for months, and today I took it out to use it independently.  No go.  I could not log on.  Do you have any idea how maddening it is when Windows keeps asking, "Did you forget your password?" when you know for certain you did not?

I tried all the obvious things—CapsLock on?  NumLock on?  Making sure they were both off had no effect; I still couldn't log on.  I'm writing the saga so that (1) I won't forget, and (2) it might help someone else as clueless as me.

Next step:  put it back in the docking station.  Worked fine.  (See, I told you I didn't forget the password.)  Took it out again.  Didn't work.

Tried the old Ctrl-Alt-Del twice to get the old-fashioned logon screen.  Still didn't work, but this enabled me to type into the username blank and actually see what I was typing, instead of a bunch of asterisks.  Turns out one of my password characters is a letter on the number pad part of the keyboard, and even though the light indicated that NumLock was off, the keyboard was producing numbers, not letters.

Okay, problem diagnosed.  Now what?  A Google search, of course.  The first suggestions were to take the keyboard apart and clean it.  Not only was I not up for that, but I didn't have high expectations of it working, since the key obviously toggled the indicator light on and off—just not the actual function.

The next several suggestions were to meddle with the BIOS.  I don't think so!

Finally, I found one that said to hold the shift key down while pressing and releasing the NumLock key.  Presto!  Problem solved.  I don't know what it actually did, but it worked, and for the moment  that's good enough for me.  I hope writing the story here eventually helps someone else.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Stephan's suggestion, I now have a permanent solution rather than one that has to be renewed every time I reboot:  At the user login prompt, type Shift/NumLock, then turn the machine off before doing anything else.

Back in the 70's I sometimes thought computing was half voodoo.  Now it's up to 90%.

That's the subtitle of a Wired article by Edward Tufte.  My brother sent me the link.  I prefer to believe he didn't know I was in the middle of working on a PowerPoint presentation of pictures from our recent trip to Europe.

Tufte is not speaking primarily about education, but he makes this perceptive observation: 

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

PowerPoint isn't really the villain here, however.

When our children were in high school, long before classroom computer use became pervasive, they were sometimes asked to "report on" books by making posters about them.  This was in honors, "gifted," or Advanced Placement classes, mind you!  Being artistically-minded, the girls enjoyed these projects, but they took up a lot of time and their educational value—except possibly in graphic arts—was essentially nil.

Speaking from experience, it's much easier and more fun to find clipart, arrange graphics, tweak colors, choose backgrounds, and play with shapes and shading than it is to craft text—and I happen to love writing.  How much more so to a student who is still struggling with the art of putting his thoughts down on paper! The making of an attractive presentation of written and visual information is not a bad skill to learn, but any teacher who frequently allows students to get away with Internet research instead of library visits, and low-content, high-graphic PowerPoint presentations instead of well-written, detailed, highly verbal reports, is wasting their time and taxpayers' money.

That said, I'll get back to my own PowerPoint work.  :)  To me, it's computer-based scrapbooking, and I want to get our trip pictures into a form that's easy to appreciate.  Some people prefer to read an illustrated story—the blog version is for them.  A few (very few) people will want to see every picture we took—all 900+ of them—minus the really awful ones.  Most, however, will appreciate the PowerPoint version, condensed, edited, and spruced up with some music and a few graphic effects.  At least I hope so—that's why I'm creating it.

I doubt any English teacher will ever see it.

The May 21, 2007 issue of Computerworld has an interview with Amory B. Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute.  Talk about RETHINKING—who would have thought industry had a good use for slush?

You advocate using, of all things, slush to cool data centers. Can you explain that? We recently did a design for a high-tech facility in a temperate climate that was originally going to have over 20,000 tons of chillers, and by the time we got through, the number was zero.

We found we could meet about 70% of the load with the coolness or dryness of the outside air using either air-side or water-side economizers, depending on the time of year. The rest [came from] a mountain of slush sprayed out of snow-making machines into a hole in the ground on a few cold nights and used to provide 32-degree Fahrenheit meltwater all year.

Twenty thousand tons of chillers originally planned; zero used.  They use snow-making machines to generate the slush; perhaps the next step should be finding a way to use the mountains of snow urban areas are always struggling to dispose of in the winter.

Our router seems to be acting erratically again.  Last time the problem was the power supply, and I have a spare one to try now if necessary, though it's hard to believe this one would fail after just three months.  (Then again, I said that about our car battery recently.)

It's fine at the moment, but in the past 12 hours has twice done strange things like allowing just one half of a telephone "conversation," or allowing e-mail to be received and sent but not allowing web access.  To be on the safe side, I've set up the system to ring my cell phone if it doesn't establish contact via the regular phone.

Computers.  You can't live with them, and...it's hard to remember that we once lived without them.

I wrote earlier about our failing telephone system.  We limped along for a week with all calls forwarded to one or the other of our cell phones.  Actually, it wasn't much of a limp.  It was slightly annoying not to be able to have more than one person on this end of a call, and since my cell phone has no "free" minutes (it's a prepaid plan), I was conscious of the cost of every call.  But it wasn't that much, really.  A definite plus was that the forwarding message, "please wait while we try to contact your party" effectively foiled all those robotic telemarketers!

Still, now that it's fixed (details follow), I'm glad not to be so tied to my cell phone.  I said to Heather, "I feel like a teenager, carrying my cell phone in my pocket all the time," to which she replied, "You're not a teenager, Mom.  You still jump every time it rings."

So, I'm sure you're all wondering:  What was wrong, and how did we fix it? 

To answer that question, I have to explain how the situation deteriorated further.  I woke up one morning to no Internet connection.  This was a little more serious than the phone problem.  After trying a few of the usual fixes, I called our local cable provider to determine whether or not there was a general outage.  That should have been a simple question, but apparently it wasn't in the script, and I had to wait through a lot of help I hadn't asked for.  You know the kind—reminiscent of bad Sunday School classes—where they tell you in painstaking detail what you already know, and when you finally get to the questions you can't answer, they drop the subject.  Still, I did finally learn that there was no general outage, and I'd need to do more work on my end.

No success—and frankly, with two very active grandchildren visiting, I had little time and less incentive to worry about it.  But Porter came home last night and we tackled the problem first thing this morning.  I won't burden you with the details of everything we did—anyone who finds this entry and has a simlar problem is welcome to ask for more information in a comment—but when we switched back to the other router, it didn't work at all anymore, either!  That was just too much coincidence.  Bottom line is that the power supply was bad.  Not totally bad, and not in a way that was detectable to any of the techs who were poking around remotely.  But when we switched power supplies, suddenly the router started acting more normally...and we had Internet access again...and lo and behold, even the phone worked!

I'm glad we had a spare router and power supply to experiment with!  Having duplicates  of critical equipment is a good thing, whenever possible.  That said, we do only have one refrigerator....

If you try to call us in the next few days, please be patient.  All calls are being forwarded to our cell phones, so it may take a little longer than usual to connect.

Our CallVantage Linksys router stopped working.  Well, to be more accurate, the router still works, or I wouldn't be posting this.  But the Telephone Adaptor part no longer functions.

After 45 minutes of work with us (following much longer than that of Porter trying various things on his own), an AT&T representative supposedly determined that the SLIC (whatever that is) was bad, so they are sending us a new router.

While waiting, however, Porter configured Janet's CallVantage Linksys router to work in our system.  Supposedly.  Lo and behold, it failed in exactly the same very weird way.  Back to the AT&T helpdesk again.  Different tech, same diagnosis:  a bad SLIC.

Wait a minute.  Two routers failing at the same time, and in a peculiar way even the help techs found hard to believe?  Another long time spent on the phone, this time "further up" in the helpdesk hierarchy.  An apparently very knowledgeable man tried every thing he could, to the point where Porter now knows a lot about the insides and hidden parts of Linksys routers.  Nonetheless, the final conclusion was, "As unbelievable as this seems, it appears you really do have two routers with bad SLIC's."

Stay tuned.  And please be patient when you call.  On the plus side, this has dramatically cut down on the number of nuisance phone calls we get.