disconnected
Today we had the first rain since early May. And it wasn't even wimpy rain, it was a nice solid downpour. Unfortunately this nice downpour knocked out our phone, which then took out our DSL connection. Now you're prolly thinking, how bad could it be if you're posting online right now. That's the catch. My DSL and phone are still completely down. I just happened to find some random stranger's wifi access point connection, which is what i'm using as I sit on the floor outside of the bathroom (the only place where I can seem to pick up the signal).
As for the crazy intervening details, it just died at about 11:55AM, with a few sputtering attempts to reconnect. At first we thought that it was just the DSL, and I tried all the normal solutions like power cycling the DSL modem several times. But alas, that had no effect. After about 40 minutes of getting no where, i decided it was time to call Pacbell to see wtf was going on. That's when i figured out that the phone was dead too. Thankfully I had my cell phone, and used that to open a ticket. At the time, Denise seemed fairly well convinced that it was all due to the storm, and that it would get corrected on its own. For a while I wanted to believe her, but after we had gone 3 hours with no change, I started to wonder. At that point, i decided to see if any of my nice and not so nice neighbors had an open wifi access point. I figured, i'd just keep trying to grab a DHCP lease as I walked the perimeter of the house. I started in our bedroom and bathroom, but got nothing. I wandered through the living room but still nothing. I was just about to give up all hope in the 2nd bathroom when all of a sudden i got a lease. At first I just figured that it was just a fluke, or that it would be locked down in some fashion. But once I was able to ssh out to a box on the internet, i knew i was all set.
Now, I have no idea how long this access point will stay up, or if this mysterious neighbor will suddenly notice that some of the bandwidth is 'missing'. The interesting little twist here is that this neighbor apparently has a Pacbell DSL account too, so whatever broke for me isn't building wide. So for now, i'm sitting on the floor outside the 2nd bathroom with a wifi signal that hovers around 55% strength and 30dB.