Tag: Meta-blog

Well, that wasn’t long. Certainly not long enough for anybody to actually miss this blog. Maybe I should go into hiding again!

Anyhow, yes, the DSL has been installed and life is now happy and blissful at Minas Jaquandor. The moral of the story is: if your dial-up modem is about to die horribly, order your DSL upgrade package ten days before it does.

Although there was one minor hiccup: The Wife actually left the apartment yesterday morning for about two hours, which is of course when UPS tried to deliver our modem. They left the little post-it note saying “We’ll try again on Monday”; my response was, “Oh no you won’t. I’m coming to get my package.” Or, as I said to my fellow Wayne’s World-quoting friend at The Store, “It will be mine, oh yes. It will be mine.”

So at 7:00 on Friday night I’m driving through the East Side of Buffalo, heading for the UPS shipping center. And wow, is that place big. I figured it would be, but damn, it’s a huge joint. I was amused by the little signs on the streetlight posts lining their long service road: “Leave yourself an out”, “Make sure they see you”, “Aim high”. Refreshers from Driver’s Ed for UPS drivers, I suppose?

Anyhow, I got the modem and had it fired up in about an hour after we had dinner (Chinese) and put The Daughter (not Chinese) to bed. The only technical problem that I ran into during the installation was that one of our other phone jacks in another room had an old length of phone cord still plugged into it, from an older phone setup of ours. Took me about half an hour to realize that was screwing things up and interfering with the DSL line, but when I unplugged that, everything started working.

And now my Internet connection is fast. Like, “I don’t have to wait for YouTube stuff to download” fast.

All I need now is a cellphone, and I’ll be in the 21st century.

Regular posting will resume later on, perhaps.

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Well, folks, this blog will be laying fallow for an indeterminate period of time, due to technical issues.

Basically, when we got our new computer for Christmas, it didn’t come with a modem (long story there), so I bought from Best Buy an outboard modem to use that connects to the USB port. I should have realized I was in trouble when the installation instructions said something like, “At this point Windows will warn you that this driver does not pass Windows Testing, but don’t worry. It works.”

Well, the modem driver never got along well with the rest of the computer, often causing spontaneous restarts due to driver conflicts and whatnot. Yesterday it finally got so bad that it actually corrupted some important file, said file being so important that Windows couldn’t even restart. So I had to a complete system recovery.

Since the computer’s still so young, very little important data was lost; I still have all of my backup discs from when I switched computers in December. Also fortunately, I placed my order to switch to DSL service ten days ago, so I’m expecting the DSL modem and software to arrive sometime soon. But I don’t know when, and in the meantime, I am not putting the new modem back on my computer. It’s going away. Bye-bye. (Its brand name is Dynex, by the way.)

So, until I get my DSL service and connection all fired up, my Internet activity will be restricted to brief moments from work when I’m on break (or, as I am right now, before my scheduled shift starts). I’ll still be able to check e-mail sporadically, but I won’t be able to write blog entries at all until I’m up and running again.

Please keep checking in, though. You never know when I’ll be back. Hopefully soon.

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Since I’ve been away from blogging for a few days, I’ve therefore failed thus far to acknowledge good news for the guy whose blog inspired me to launch this blog in parlaying his long experience of blogging into paid work: Sean Meade will be Project Editor for the Aviation Week website, concentrating on defense tech (if I’m reading it correctly). I guess that means Sean will now be the resident expert in flying machines that can kill us all? That’s very cool, and I wish him the best of luck. It’s always nifty when a person gets to make money doing something that’s genuinely interesting to them.

I will, of course, be closely following Sean’s work over there to see if he manages to sneak in anything like “Maybe smart bombs don’t exist, but rather subsist!” (That’s an unimaginably lame in-joke that only the six people who were in a certain class in college with Sean and I will get.)

Anyhow, go give Sean some congratulations. Or he’ll sic the bombers on you. He can do that now. (I’m a little surprised that they send out launch codes to any G-mail address, but hey, Google probably had the launch codes years ago.)

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Sorry for three days away from Ye Olde Blogge. It’s been a busy week in “real life”, what with Lenten potluck dinners and services at church and Friday fish fries and trips to the library on Thursday night and a fairly large project at The Store and a new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay to read. But I’m back now, more or less. (Sometimes less is more, after all.)

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Sorry for the silence the last couple of days, but real life has been busier than usual at home. (Not in any kind of bad way, but just busy.) Anyhow, time for a momentous revelation:

Five years ago today, Byzantium’s Shores went “live”.

Five years and more than five thousand posts later, here we are, keeping the beat marching on. How much longer can I go? Who knows? I suspect that there are fewer days ahead for this blog than there are behind, but you never know. Sometimes I get the hankering to sign off from Blogistan, but I’m kind of like Crash Davis in that regard: “Well, I quit! F*** this f***ing game! [beat] Who do we play tomorrow?”

I started off as a pseudonymous blogger, writing brief posts about books and movies and TV shows and the occasional sporting event. Now, I’m pretty much non-pseudonymous, but with the same kinds of posts about books and movies and TV shows and the occasional sporting event. The only real difference is that I’ve gotten more long-winded.

But five years is a pretty interesting chunk of time over which to survey once it’s over. In that time I’ve held a job I hated (and at which I sucked), got fired from said job, moved to Syracuse and spent a winter there*, moved back to Buffalo, spent a year-and-a-half unemployed, joined The Store, spent fifteen months attempting — and ultimately failing — to raise a son with severe cerebral palsy, and more. I’ve also met a whole lot of fine bloggers, both in cyberspace and outside of it, enough so as to enrich my life handsomely.

Anyhow, thanks to all my readers for dropping by over the past five years and to all the fellow travelers in Blogistan who have linked me from time to time.

* Hey, Buffalo, you want to know what winter’s like in Syracuse? Imagine the last week or so, and extend that from mid-December to mid-March. Why it’s Buffalo that’s got the snow-and-cold reputation is beyond me.

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I just added a thingie called a “ZoomCloud” to the sidebar. I don’t know if it is of any use at all, but there it is.

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