After running tests all week, I think I can honestly say I'm back permanently.
It wasn't real obvious at first, but since October of last year, I've only been on line less than roughly nine hours totally. I could come on, make one post, and then lose the connection, or not even be able to make the post at all. This has obviously put a massive crimp in my ability to do anything constructive or even annoy people.
Very quick explanation...
I live in a semi-rural area that is(was) serviced originally by one of those teeny private phone companies where pretty much every call to the guy across the street was a long-distance toll call. These were all swallowed up by Verizon, etc., but pretty much ignored as far as improvement and maintenance was concerned. The massive ice storms and lousy weather over the winter pretty much made it impossible to do any thing except call grandma and tap out a Morse Code happy birthday by biting the phone line.
Basically, a total of 18 30-40-foot trees came down on my little piece of heaven, our street phone lines had to be replaced 3 times, the connection to my house twice, and after checking the results, we discovered massive damage to house phone wiring, all of which I had to replace from scratch. Some of you know I had smashed my modem, but it turns out the damage was more extensive--wiring broken within the walls, major damage to the computer and drives (mostly in the wiring and connections), and we had to fix these by looking for and cannibalizing some suitable matching stuff I got in trade for a case of beer.
Then we got hit by lightening and blew the surge suppressors and all the drives (we thought) but I was able to get them back to normal with a few tricks I learned back in the 80s (basically, they froze--no damage, but they just "got stuck"). For a week now, I've been testing every connection and all the operating software and files to make sure we got everything, and everything passed muster...
So, crossing fingers, I'm back in operation. Tonight or tomorrow, I'll have a new POW Challenge up, find all the messages that came in and answer them, and finally get all the POWs that haven't gone to poll yet up (probably by Tuesday).
Thank you for your patience, sorry if I worried anyone, but I literally didn't have any way to alert anyone, and I noticed a few people that volunteered to help if I run into problems again, so I'm going to contact them and work out a way to get around the POW getting screwed up in the future.
For the record...
I have not been hit by a comet or meteor...yet...
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Glad to know that you are ok.
x
SSG
.gif ";)")
Originally Posted by Ilaekae
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