Silly Music Mensch

I was just downloading some new albums from eMusic, and I realized that I hadn't noted a few from earlier this month. They are:

• Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble performing Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich


• The Enchantment by Chick Corea and Bela Fleck


• Around Dusk - Kristin Hersh (one song)

Now for the 'new' albums I've just picked up.

• Marshlands by Warne Marsh


• Locust Abortion Technician by Butthole Surfers


• I Know What Boys Like - The Waitresses (one song)

Werewolves of Portland

Yes, we saw the lunar eclipse tonight, Renee and I. Got there a few minutes before the last bright wedge disappeared behind the umbra, and then walked around the neighborhood for a while looking for darker blocks.

Unfortunately, I don't possess camera equipment sensitive enough to capture this in city lights, so memories will have to do.

Offline Again

Just a quick note to observe that Verizon has managed to fumble my home Internet connection again. I'm posting this from work. We lost connectivity sometime Tuesday night, and haven't got it back yet. So...

• Major outage when they insisted that I had to be switched from Frame Relay to ATM, for "reliability"


• Outage for several days to replace a DSL modem that I'd had for less than a year.


• Now an outage which the tech took an hour to diagnose (ending in the winning quote "you don't have Internet access"). To be fair, I think he meant that there was a connection, just no TCP/IP stack, since he could see my DSL modem from his office, and I could see it from my computer, so theoretically there's an end-to-end connection...

Guess Kevin J. Martin is doing his job guaranteeing that the free market gives us the best possible broadband choices.

Update

The "Central Office" called yesterday to say that the problem was fixed. Of course it wasn't. Jean was home yesterday, and she called tech support again, did the hour-long diagnostic two-step, and finally got the answer, "your modem is failing." Again. After it was replaced seven months ago. Maybe if Verizon put a little more quality into their equipment, they wouldn't have to spend so much money on tech support.

Anyway, they're shipping us a replacement, which will probably arrive sometime next week. Only then will we see if the diagnosis is correct this time...

Update Two

And, we're back. Got the new DSL modem, hooked it up, configured it, and encountered the annoying redirect to Verizon portal page. This has happened each time I've had a major problem. Just when I think I'm done, I have to call Verizon tech support again to have them walk me through the secret backdoor to turn off the stupid redirect. I think I know how to do it myself now, but it's just damned annoying that they put hurdle after hurdle in your way for a product you've paid for.

Anyway, hi alls!

Hacker Slobs

I'm not even sure anyone will be able to read this for awhile, but I'll record it for my own amusement.

This morning I was awoken by cats, and the first thing I hear upon getting up is "my keyboard won't work." Jean has been trying to log into her computer in the dining room, but it doesn't seem to want to take input. So I wandered into the dining area, and began tapping on keys. It turns out that the 'escape' key and the caps lock key both work. So I rebooted in 'safe mode' (hold down the shift key while rebooting, to disable non-Apple extensions), and that worked, so I now knew that the shift key worked as well. But I was still unable to use the alphanumeric keys.

Now I decided to unplug every peripheral but the keyboard and the mouse (which coincidentally continued to work throughout the entire ordeal). One of the things I unplugged was Renee's graphics pad. Reboot, and magically, the keyboard began working! Jean guessed that the graphics pad was somehow interfering with the keyboard, and I'm happy to go with that for now.

Second experience, I went to my own computer and started up the web browser, which is set to go directly to www.terebi2.org. Instead it failed to find the page, and Verizon 'helpfully' stepped in with a search page saying terebi2 "does not exist or is not available!", instead of allowing the 404. I tried pinging the URL, and got "PING web2.fwd.easydns.com (66.150.2.134): 56 data bytes" with zero throughput. I did a whois, and yes, I still own the domain. I know I am paid up with the ISP who hosts the webpages, so I went to easydns to check. I can log in, and I'm paid up. But, they record that they've been under a Denial of Service (DOS) attack since yesterday.

They claim that they've mostly fixed the problem, but I know from experience that it takes awhile for the name forwarding to propagate again, hence Verizon's claim that this site doesn't exist. I only get to the article posting page because it links directly to the ISP. So I hope that this post will be visible before the weekend is out, otherwise I'll have to play hot potato with Easydns and Verizon as to who is responsible.

Hope you see me soon!

Update

As noted in the first comment to this post, Mark Jeftovic, a techie for easyDNS, actually tracked down my post (I left no help message after figuring out what was happening). He actually left me an email explaining in greater detail what had happened. When I asked how he'd spotted my post, he told me he has a buncha search tools that look for mentions of easyDNS. Pretty neat.

Adam, thanks for confirming visibility. I'll have to log onto the IRC channel soon and catch up with you.

Lisa, you use Windows, right? Interesting to see that similar peripherals can give headaches on that platform and Mac OS X. Anyway, I am back online. Good to get feedback from all of you.

Two Songs

Jean picked out a song specifically for me:

• Nissque - Canto de smile (Mash-up artist, Nixx; mashing 'Jurassic 5' and Lilly Allen

Then, one evening on the way home from work, I heard a song that I was intrigued with, so I hunted it down:

• I'm All Right - Madeleine Peyroux

I've got a new queue of credits for the month at eMusic, so look for more experiments soon...

Completed Anime

Renee and I completed Zombie Loan. About what you'd expect, Renee and I had fun with it, and are now feeding on the trickle of Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro.

For myself, I have finished Kaze no Stigma. I'm not really sure why I stuck with it, as it was pretty pedestrian, but I did. I continue to watch Akagi and Kaiji, dabble in Denno Coil, and truck on with Dragonaut, Ghost Hound and Moyashimon. New series include Shigofumi and Persona. Latest, still pending a decision on how long I'll watch, is Hatenkou Yugi.