ISP Blues

January 21, 2001

Dear Diary:
It's been a long week, and I don't feel like much has been accomplished. In fact, the whole month has gone by, and I feel like I have been stuck in the sand.

I wanted to write and work on part two of the rodent tales, and I went as far as creating a new web page and I uploaded it to my site, only to not have it appear.

Now that's nice. I worked on revisions, I worked on every setting I could think of, I loaded and UPloaded and DOWNloaded, and erased and uploaded again... and I was really getting frustrated.

I called tech support and they let me in on two little secrets. Secret one, I probably should recode every single link on my web pages, since I am using the original temporary web address I was given.

I figure that's about 2,000 changes. Piece of cake, I'll do them in my spare time.

Secret two, My ISP sucks. Evidently it is not refreshing the data that I send out to California. I change a page, and tech support in California can see it, everyone else on the planet can probably see it, but I sure cannot.

YIPPIE

Which brings to mind the state of the office this week.

A month or so ago, I had finally decided to surrender and buy the high priced interent spread, a DSL line. However, bringing DSL into the office means the following:

Purcase a new hub and router for the Dsl connection to be shared with all the computers.

Pull new wires through the floor to replace the old cable that will not work with DSL.

Become a contortionist and crawl into crawl space between office floors when cable gets stuck in a rafter.

Climb out of rafters covered with 25 years of dust.

Take apart 5 computers, remove old network card, insert new network card, and then attempt to load new software.

Succeed with 3 out of 5, leaving two that do not want to co-operate in any way, shape or form. As punishment, leave them in pieces on the floor of the office.

Question? Who is being punished?

Go home to watch hockey games.

Refuse to be the timekeeper so you can take pictures.

Take pictures.

Spend Sunday scanning slides to enter into various photo contests, so perhaps you might win a T-shirt or something like that.

Decide to totally re-arrange the galleries by theme, and start making new pages. Stop making pages when sucky ISP won't refrest so you can see your work.

Put up a really nice pic that you like on the site - one that you think is truly majestic. I think it may become one of my alltime favorites - an Elk in Yellowstone - (Warning - it may take a moment to load)

And since everyone else is putting pictures of themselves out there on the web, go ahead, and get a little dangerous.

Now, Who Be da man?

There are pictured here, 4 happy climbers, having just finished a technical ascent of Little Bear in southern Colorado. It is 14,037 feet high (4,279 meters) and is considered one of the toughest 14ers in Colorado.

Oh yes... the picture date... July 1976 - The slide kept its color after 25 years.