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When the Internet QuitBy Will Bontrager Early Sunday morning, I was happily doing Internet things. Suddenly, the Internet quit. It wasn't the Internet itself, but something suddenly went awry. It was our LAN, our satellite communications software, our satellite dish, the satellite bird, or the ISP. Things like this have happened before, so I wasn't concerned. I have a mental checklist, one of which almost always gets us back on line. But not this time. Try as I might, it wouldn't let us back on line. And to make matters more tense, we were planning to start a 3-day trip the next day. This meant that Sunday was the day when we would get everything caught up — installations installed, ezine queued for delivery, and product upgrade testing completed and description page written (yes, I was planning to queue the launch of a major upgrade for Tuesday, the middle of our trip). Satelling software tech support got four calls from a pay phone (we were out of cell phone range). This is the first time those folks didn't get us back up and going within 30 minutes after giving them a call. They're good. But that day they were unable to deliver. Salt Lake City, the location of the company that manufactures the satellite dish we're using, Motosat, wasn't very far off our planned route. We drove there on Monday instead of our previously planned destination. Wouldn't you know it, Monday was a Utah State holiday, Pioneer Day, and nobody was answering the phones at Motosat and nobody was on the premises. There goes another day. I was a worried about customer emails not being answered and tech support requests not being addressed. We spent Monday and Monday night in the Motosat parking lot, in back of the building, where they accept deliveries. After noon on Tuesday, we were back on line. It turned out to be a software problem, which the tech found and fixed in about 30 minutes. I did final testing on the Master Syndication Gateway V2 upgrade and queued the ezine while the email was downloading (over 1500 emails). Then I started answering email. Luckily, there were no urgent tech support requests. But answering email accumulated over the previous 55 hours took my whole attention until about 3:30 (15:30) in the afternoon. We wanted to get out of that parking lot. Geez, it's hot there in the Utah desert. So we took to the road, traveling north. Right now, we're in Idaho, less than an hour's drive east of Twin Falls and nearly four hours drive to the Oregon state line. It's late. I took care of the email I needed to take care of. But the installations will have to wait until morning. I don't like to do things on other people's servers when my brain is tired. I'll just get up early and get them done before we go back on the road. July 26, 2005 Please note: Articles on this website are presented "as is". However - If you have a question about a CGI script, HTML, CSS, PHP, or JavaScript
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