Pleading the Fifth
It was a very frantic and upsetting start to the morning today, as I woke up to find no Internet connection. Of course, my first inclination is to reset the router, and when that didn’t work, I looked at the router DHCP settings, and knew something was wrong, since the router was getting some caca IP address from the cable company. So, I released and renewed the IP address a few times, and finally reset the cable modem, too, in the hopes that that would do some good. Alas, it didn’t, and there was nothing left for me to do but sit on the futon and ping, waiting to see some signs of life. It’s not just that I couldn’t get to Internet, of course, but that Sedition Radio would also be unreachable from the outside, and I feel a responsibility to “the people.” As you may have guessed by now, things finally did come back up.
A new law goes into effect this month in NYS, requiring all homes (almost) to have carbon monoxide detectors. This is because somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 people die annually (in the entire United States of America) from CO poisoning. 450 out of, what, about 300 million? That’s something like .00015%. You’d think they’d have something more important to worry about (like, oh, I dunno, the 45,000 or so people that die annually from lack of health insurance). They won’t be sending the CO detector police out to your house, but if you die from CO poisoning and don’t have a detector, you’re gonna get fined. Frankly, our house has so many holes in it, I can’t see any significant amounts of CO building up anytime soon, though I think we actually have a detector someplace. It used to be on the ceiling in the basement, but we took it down to paint, and who knows where the hell it is now.
Big snow storm heading east for the weekend, and it’s going to stay well south of where I live. That means I get to laugh at people who live where a few inches of snow shuts everything down, without having to break out the shovel myself. Sounds like a plan.
Oh well, this whole Internet access kerfuffle has shortened my morning prep time, so I better get going. Let’s get this week over already – after all, it’ll be Monday soon.
