Everything is relative

I’m in Toronto this week for an IBM conference on Knowledge Management (so far, it’s been great). The hotel is a little bit behind the times technologically and doesn’t have Ethernet in the rooms…and the PBX limits connect speeds to 21.8kbps or slower. So I was a bit upset about being cut off (or almost cut off) from the world, and having to pay for the slow connections I get (and pay even more if I stay online for more than 30 minutes at a time).

But then I talked with Diane, who told me that she’s been completely without connectivity at home since I left; I talked her through resetting the router and DSL modem, to no avail. So I sent a note to my ISP to find out what’s going on — their reply said that all of their Northern California customers have been without service since Monday morning but they “hope” to have it fixed tomorrow. Sheesh.

Somehow, 21.8kpbs doesn’t sound so bad after all….

Showing my support

Ilana at Inner Balance made a wonderful suggestion — that “proud Jewish people” who support Israel add the Israeli flag to their weblogs, and, as you may have already noticed, I’ve done so. That does not mean I approve of all of the actions of the Sharon government — I don’t. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Israel needs to be preserved as a Jewish state (we can argue some other time about how much power the religious right should have in the Israeli government…less than they do today, that’s for sure).

RFC 3251 – more real than I thought!

This year, RFC 3251, Electricity over IP, was one of the April 1st RFCs.  Diane sent a copy to her brother who works for Avaya, and got this reply:

The really scary part is people really ARE working on how do distribute electricity over IP! This is needed to power IP telephones.

I’ll have to send this to our power group :-)

Boldly going…

[Everything in this section blatantly ripped off from Brad‘s Must See HTTP]

DOGS. IN. SPAAAAAACE! A fanpage for Porthos, Captain Archer’s faithful beagle from Enterprise. [hat tip to The Cabal]

LCARS HICCOUGH: Meanwhile, these missives from the official Star Trek news site, stardate:04012002…


The foolishness continues…

I spent too long on the phone today with Experian, Equifax, and Linkline, but it looks like I made some progress; Experian and Equifax took my corrections and will be sending us updated reports, and Linkline is still working with Verizon to clean up the mess (which, apparently, got started when I tried to consolidate my two phone bills into one — for some reason, Verizon took that as a decision to terminate my DSL service, and it’s been confused ever since). And I won’t know if I’ve beaten the X-10 box into submission until tomorrow morning; I tried to fix it yesterday, but made a subtle programming error which meant nothing turned itself on this morning.