Storms abound

You don’t realize how much you like your creature comforts until your power goes out.

Some of you may have heard the bit about “bad storms in North Carolina.” (Indeed most people reading this quite likely are in North Carolina.) Apparently it was true. Usually I pooh-pooh any winter weather warnings in this state. After all, I’m a Yankee. We saw snow in Chicago a bit more than you do here. In this case, though, all hell really broke loose. Traffic lights are out all over the city and people are driving like idiots. On Wednesday night, in the middle of me fixing up our firewall to pass traffic to our new name server IPs, the power went out. It stayed our until about 1030 on Thursday.

It’s scary being without power. I don’t hear the sound of my boxes running at night. I miss the slight light that all the LEDs and such give off in my room. I don’t have the white noise of the bathroom fan running when I go to pee. (We didn’t really miss the heat. We still have the A/C on.) I realized how little there is to do without computers. I could have fired up my laptop, but I didn’t have any Internet access and I wanted to conserve the battery in case I really needed it for something. I woke up once in the middle of the night and swore I saw a blue flash in my window. I was either abducted by aliens or it was another Transformer blowing. Our cable service, and therefore our cable modem, is out. We’re sharing my VNet 56K dial-up connection right now. Oh the horrors.

I take back the nice things I said about NSI previously. When I called them on Wednesday to figure out why they refused to change the IPs for my name servers, they first told me my original rejection was basically a data entry error on their part. (The guy actually said, “someone must have hit the wrong button.”) Then it came back and said something like “we’re unable to make these changes because this DNS server already exists.” Yes, thank you, I know it exists. I want to modify it. So I call back again, and now, on the third or fourth call (I forget which) the guy says, “hey, we can’t change these name servers: they’re in a domain that’s not registered with us.” Unfortunately this is what I told the first fucking guy I called. Went to Dotster and finally found the place to change the IPs there. Worked like a charm.