A morning without the Internet

The third thing I usually do after waking up in the morning is fire up the computer, start Firefox and then navigate to my Google Reader page so I can catch up on what's going on. Well this morning was one of those usual mornings.

However, no page load, hmmm, ok let me check the weather, hmmm, no page load. I look over to the router and all the appropriate lights are lit including the blue one, which tells me the phone is working (VOIP--T-mobile@home). Next I check the Internet Connections to verify they are working, yes they are. I'm puzzeled at this point.

Next I decide to check the firewall. I don't see that Firefox is being blocked, which could of been possible, as I just raised the level of it last night but there was no problems there. What is going on?

Finally I decide it's time to call my ISP. First I get to talk to a computer which walks me through the process of disconnecting the power cord for a few seconds so that they can re-boot the modem. Well that didn't work so up next the voice suggests that the cable could be loose. It's not and I know it's not but I humor the process anyways and un-screw it and re-screw it back on. Nothing! The friendly female computer voice now says "Ok that didn't work so now I will connect you to a customer service representative".

After not too long of a wait I'm now connected to India or Pakistan, I'm really not sure which. Thankfully she got right to the point and checked to see if they are experiencing an outage in my area. They were but she said not to worry it will be back on in about an hour.

I kill time for an hour cleaning off my desktop and organizing paperwork. After an hour and fifteen minutes had elapsed I checked again but still not working. At this point I realize this could either be fixed in the next minute or could take who knows how long. So I decide to run a defrag, it's been a bit of time since the last one and I had a new defragger (JkDefrag) that is supposed to do alot better than the standard issued one that Windows uses. So this is a good time to use it.

After reading some tips from the maker of the utility I decide to perform a defrag at boot time so that more files can be defragmented. I also wanted to customize the process which would require using the command line version of the tool. I couldn't get it to work for nothing. I am not really that experienced with working at the command line. So I go back to his website to see if I can get enlightened about how to use it and I was. I found an alternative to running the tool with the same options but with the executable instead. Great! I try again with the new method. It's working but it is going slow, of which the website did say that would be the case while doing a boot time defrag. So I have got some time to kill while waiting for this to finish. I decide to clean the kitchen and do last nights dishes.

I come back to check the progress and determine that is really is going to take some time. I decide to try and repair my fan that fell out of the window a few nights ago. The power cord got caught up in the fan blades and as a result one of the ends of the cord was pulled out of its connection.

I take the back of the fan and began to search for the spot the wire belonged. I couldn't find it for nothing. So I went with the only possible location to put the wire into. I then plugged the fan in and turned on the power and then a small pop sound. The computer and monitor went off and the fan didn't turn on. It turns out that it fried the surge protector (better that than the computer) so I replaced it with another one and got everything back on again, except for the fan.

Now what I failed to mention earlier was that about an hour or so had passed before the abrubt power outage on the computer. So what really happened is I just lost an hours worth of defrag time and now need to start over. By now the Internet was back up and I was getting anxious so I passed on doing the boot time defrag and opted instead letting Windows boot up and then run it.

This was a good choice, it was defragging quicker but I had selected the option to move all the directories on the disk to an alphabetical order which of course takes time.

Finally everything is done. I am back at the computer and ready. Instead of picking up right where I should of I decide to mess with a few settings which the firewalls built-in HIPS protection didn't like me doing and even though I clicked on "Allow" the process froze the computer. I couldn't even do a Alt+Ctrl+Del. Nothing like having to do a hard boot.

Ok, back up and running, a few more tweaks and finally get online. Oh, the computer is acting a bit peppier now. I think that defrag utility did it's trick.

I wonder if my ISP knows the problems one experiences without an Internet connection?

Just in case your curious about the first two things I do in the morning, they are a cup of coffee and a ciggarette.

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