And It's Back!

NASA seems to have gotten Spirit back online. They are still running tests and expect to attempt some driving this weekend. Sweet!

Another day of heavy school stuff. I just got word from one of my instructors that pretty much all my documents are unreadable to him. Great. I have a couple ideas of what to do, but if that doesn't work, I have no idea where to go next. I don't have a copy of MS Office, and I really don't want to spend $150 to get it just for this. Although given that I'm spending $1,000 a class, it isn't that big of a deal, but I just really don't want MS Office on my system. Everyone I know that has Open Office has no problem passing stuff back and forth with Office. It has never worked for me. Not once. Not in all three major releases of Open Office. It sucks. I have no idea what I can do different. File, Save As... change to Word 97/2000/XP. That's it. And it doesn't work. (shrug)

Other than that, we didn't do much. I got a bunch of reading done today while our internet connection was acting weird. We were getting out on the network outside the cable moden, but DNS was down. Then up. Then down. And now it seems like it's up. Now I see all kinds of news reports that Google was having some problem with everything other than Google being flagged as dangerous in search results. That shouldn't have had anything to do with DNS, but I'm not a big believer in coincidences. I've seen my share of them in the 22 years spent in the cubes, but not many. But the problem with the internet is that everything is a black box that either works or doesn't, and when it doesn't everyone just points fingers at each other. I'll probably never know.

And 20 years ago, none of this existed in its current form, and a fast connection to a BBS or CompuServe was 1200 baud. And you paid by the hour for CompuServe, plus there were no local numbers where I lived, so I got killed with long distance charges as well. With BBS's, they were usually free, but as most were running in some guys basement, there would only be a handful of connections, so you had hours of busy signals before getting on. Then the BBS would kick you of after 15 to 30 minutes so the next guy could get on. There were some big BBS's that didn't have that problem, but they were long distance. So yea.

I have to say that I've been pretty happy with Cable One as an ISP. This is only the second time service has gone out. The first time someone hit a utility pole with their car, so it's hard to fault them for that, and it was back the next day. The only thing I don't like is that they throttle back the connection if you have large downloads, like movies from Amazon Unbox. The first half the movie downloads at 3Mb, then it suddenly drops to less than 1Mb. It eventually makes it, usually over-night. I suspect it has more to do with wanting people like us to sign up with their cable TV service than with any real bandwidth concerns. Digital movies are a direct threat to their movie channels, so it's hardly surprising, but annoying none the less. They also actively block LimeWire (and, I assume, BitTorrent and the like), but LimeWire had gotten so polluted with junk that it was more work than it was worth to get anything from them anyway. I never got into BitTorrent. I know a lot of people swear by it, but I have enough to do that I don't need to find new things to mess with.

Speaking of finding things to do, once the school thing is over, I need to figure out what I'm going to do with myself. I'm not really sure what you do with a BS in Management and Ministry Leadership other than be a pastor (no thanks; still haven't recovered from the last time) or keep going until I get a PhD, then teach other people getting a BS in Management and Ministry Leadership. Probably should have thought of that earlier (like about $25,000 earlier...). Ah well. Maybe it will help me land another dish washing gig. Not that any sort of gig is likely as long as the economy stays the way it is. And odds are that it will stay the way it is for quite some time. Maybe I can dig ditches, then fill them back in for the federal government when Congress passes Obama's "stimulous" package.

Well, it's late and I need to get some school stuff done tomorrow morning.