This week hasn’t exactly been a great one. Early in the week, we had a great rodent event of the non-computer kind, which caused all kinds of excitment among the feline residents. If you’ve heard the Jethro Tull song about the Mouse Police ("the mouse police never sleeps!") I’m here to tell you that it’s all a dirty lie. The Mouse Police spends quite a bit of time sleeping and NOT catching the mousie. After 36 hours or so, the useless tabby hunters apparently just wore the poor thing out. When I found a cat staring at a very tired-looking mouse, we (humans) caught the rodent and released it in the meadow for a little R&R.
After the great rodent event, we had the big Web site failure. A hard disk crashed on the server that runs our web sites and they had to be rebuilt. And when our sites go down we get LOTS of e-mail.
Except we couldn’t reliably get our e-mail because we also had the great connectivity failure. Here in Idaho, Micron Internet Services sold all their dial-up service to Earthlink, of the o-so-stupid commercials fame. Now with this provider, we can enjoy busy signals, just like AOL users. After a little research, it turns out that Earthlink is using the same access number as at least two other Internet services (that I know of anyway).
Trying to get our feeble 56K dial-up service to connect is boring. I finally sat on Earthlink’s 800 number forever so I could whine at them about their busy signals. The tech guy tested it (i.e., dialed our access number) and oh BIG surprise he got a busy signal too. So he filled out some form and "bumped it upstairs." I feel important now.
So, I spent some time researching new ISPs. The choices are pretty bleak I have to say…broadband satellite is looking better ALL the time.