I’ve got one of these in the post, thanks to Ms. Rennie at Apple Customer Relations. She’s terribly nice. Needless to say, she was more than pleased to get it all organised after she saw the mess of notes in the AppleCare PeopleSoft DB had on my name.

Of course, I’ll put up my reactions to it, and field the usual questions. And no, I won’t send it to you. So don’t ask.

I’m sure I’ll love it. Other than the name. It has a name only a mother could love.

Not long ago, the cable went out. That’s not an issue, other than I lost internet access. I still had GPRS and for email, that was okay. No major loss.

Come Friday morning, the cable was back on however. The bright sparks who’d chopped the lines open had been dispatched to some special Hell reserved for such atrocities. I had cable internet. And I had an email. Did I want to spend a week in the middle of nowhere and do some house/cat/chicken/duck sitting. With no DSL. And no night-life. And no caf√©s.

After some moments of contemplation, I emailed back and told them I’d be there at 1pm the next day. And here I’ve been since.

It’s just a case of dropping in, letting the two (three?) readers I have that I’m safe and sound, and in the country side, drinking vast amounts of hot scalding tea, sleeping late, petting kitties, and enjoying fresh eggs for my breakfast.

I’ve also had mounds of fun wielding chain-saws, working hard logging and chopping, cooking glorious things and roasting myself in-front of an open fire/furnace in the front room. I’ll make some bread later, too. Can’t wait to get back into the kitchen and have some fun.

More updates as and when.

We’ll see. Missing you all, kids.

At least now I know why there’s no cable internet anymore. It’s been about 30 hours since it went down, and I’ve got an actual answer. It seems that Transco are responsible. They’ve been digging up the main road about 500 yards away to lay new gas mains. In the process, they’ve cut into a bundle of fibre optics and killed Internet and Cable TV for the area. The trench in the road is spewing precious data and there’s no way to harvest it. Telewest also have zero idea how to resolve the issue, or at least, how to resolve the issue tonight.

Bollocks.

At least I’m reading my books. It can’t all be bad.

Some days, everything works, right off the bat. You wake up, roll out of bed to your desk, fire up an SSH session, and you’re at work in a matter of seconds. Except today. Today, SSH didn’t work. “Remote host not found.” Odd. Restart the cable modem, try again. “Remote host not found.”

OK, new method. Fire up the cell phone. Connect via GPRS. SSH in, ‚”Remote host not found.”

Today is not going to go well. The sky is dark, and there’s ice on the roads. My toast got burnt, and I couldn’t find my fucking glasses. But this was just the start. Yesterday, around 9.30 am, Eclipse UK, a major UK ADSL provider, started to experience glitches. Disconnects, the odd DNS glitch. They spent the day up and down. The odd irate call from clients, but nothing a power cycle on the router didn’t fix. As such, I went to bed not worried about it.

And this morning, it’s all gone to shit. Eclipse put the problem as a “platform failure‚” and say that the issue is fixable with just a router restart. But it’s not true. Four times, Eclipse have issued press releases saying the issue was under control. It’s not. All restarting the router achieves is pushes any one connection to a different part of Cloud and Colossus - if you’re lucky, you’ll get a slot, connect, and then all you’ve got to worry about is fucked DNS. Because don’t forget, the DNS shat itself, too. Joy of joys.

It’s now been almost 36 hours since the fucking platform went down. You’d expect that in a few hours, you could rollback software changed. You can rebuild configurations. You’d have redundant hardware. Hell, you could replace most of the racks in that time. But no. No one has a fucking clue there. The support number is just on voicemail. My direct dial numbers are answering to total utter silence. Wait a minute on the line, it hangs up. Faxes go un-answered. It’s not a power issue, either. They’ve got diesel backup. The offices haven’t burned down. The staff are there, they’ve been seen in and out of the building. The dial-up accounts still work. But ADSL is dead. DNS works for dial-up but not on anything else.

In the time wasted on this fucking adventure, I could have re-written the DNS and MX settings for my clients, have them propagate, and sent them elsewhere for at least things like email. Did I mention the spam? Thousands of mis-delivered messages. One site gets on average, a hundred a day. Right now, it’s getting 2,400 mis-delivered messages each minute. We’ve left it running, and we’re taking bets on what happens first; the 120Gb HD filling up, or Outlook shitting itself.

So much time wasted. So much stress, so much anger. It’s fucking plain that no one there has any fucking clue what the fuck is going on. They have no idea how to fix whatever the issue is. They may as well just rip the ATM core to fucking pieces, piss on it, and build a new one. There is nothing left to do. Right now, I’m still getting irate calls from people bitching about lack of email. I’m just going to turn my phone off and forward everything to Eclipse’ support number. I’m that fucked off.

And wait, there’s more! At home there is no ADSL, it’s a cable connection. This morning, it went down for about 20 minutes for a service upgrade. It came back, twice as fast. I go out, deal with fucking morons and then come back to the receive and status lights on the modem blinking at me. A phone call later, and Telewest kindly inform me that the upgrade to the network has gone tits up. The connectivity in the area is screwed for an undetermined length of time. Great. No ADSL. No cable. I need to send a fucking email. Connect via GPRS. The phone won’t keep a connection for more than 30 seconds.

I’ve fucking had it. Lord only knows when this gets posted. Right now, I don’t even fucking care anymore. Fuck this shit. I’m leaving

I’ve a confession. I hate typing, I hate my keyboard, and I hate starting at a screen

If I could find a way to turn my backlog of analogue notes (read, lots of Europa No. 4 notepads) into a perfect digital format, I would. Sure, I could rip all the pages out, and scan them, one by one, but then I loose the binding, and that’s not something I’m comfortable with in the slightest. It sounds pretentious, but they mean something to me. These notebooks are the only link I have left to my late adolescence, and I’m scared of letting go.

It’s not that it was a spectacular time of life, but the links are there, and I’d miss them. Pen and paper seem to have a feel to them; digital media does not. Sitting out in the garden, I can easily look over old books and notepads and there’s no other requirement other than to have the notes; flick through at will. The concept of the digital shoe-box is not one that ever appealed.

And so, I have a choice. I’m letting go of some of my tech toys, devices surplus to requirements. I could go one of two ways; I could re-invest in tech toys, such as the palmOne LifeDrive or, something that’s far, far more suited to my new life living in a suit, a pen I have long coveted and wished for my own. Certainly, the pen collectors would pour scorn on me for owning such a bourgeois item, but this is something I’ve wanted for so very long. I don’t think I could pass up the change to own one. Maybe then I can start to take proper notes again. One will be obsolete in 18 months, the other should, if treated properly, outlive me. I just need to make sure I don’t drop the damned thing.

Besides; I have too many things going bleep at me already. Some simplicity would be most welcome…