Thursday, April 12, 2001

by the Wunderland Toast Society

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• GinohnNews: Roller Coaster Ice Capades
• Dale and Kristin overhauled the Mailing List Signup Page - Digests now available!
• #12 caught up on his comic reviews, adding six this week
  

Computers suck. Oh sure, they're great in a zillion ways, but when they crash and things stop working, you just hate them. And for us, this has been a week of hating computers.

It all started when Northpoint went out of business and took our DSL link away as a result. Being a heavily network-oriented company, this was a painful blow. Kristin immediately instituted a modem-based workaround, which provided limited internet access by some of our computers, but we were still plagued with problems. During the router upgrade, the upstairs lost contact with the downstairs, a very annoying situation that continued for almost a week since Kristin got hit with this huge influx of distributor orders at the same time, and was stuck trying to figure out why the dial-up account we switched to refused to let us make SMTP connections.

So for most of the week, Alison and I were generally able to read our email but completely unable to send any, leaving us frustratingly mute. And of course, this all happened at a time when traffic on the Fluxx, Icehouse, and Rabbit mailing lists has gotten way out of control. At least we were able to listen in on the conversations, and more importantly, this built a fire under an ongoing effort by Dale and Kristin to make new features of our mailing list software available, which means you can now sign up for digested versions! Yay!

As for our network woes, things are getting back to normal. 56k modem speeds are painfully slow when you've been used to DSL, but that's just an annoyance, really. The real problem is that since we're tying up the house's phone line again, we've started missing phone calls, even when we're at home. This problem is aggravated by computers that are now so smart that they can decide to get access the internet on their own, thus tying up the phone lines for us without us even realizing it. This caused us yet more problems, and since we may not be able to get a new DSL line in until July (!), we added a special message to the house line, instructing callers to try reaching us on the business line if it seems like the computers are hogging the house line. Yuck.

Anyway, we've been living in malfunctioning computer hell this week. Thanks again Dale for your help in getting us through it!

For years, I've been making mix tapes of my favorite music of the day... but I stopped doing that a few years ago, when CD burners became widely available. Looking forward to the changeover to improved technology, I found I no longer wanted to make mix tapes; but even though CD-burners are pretty common now, this is our household's first one. And it's everything I've always wanted! I made my first CD this week, featuring a selection of diamonds in the rough, - you know, those songs that are the only one you like on a CD with other songs you don't care for. Now I can put them all on one CD!

The iTunes software is incredibly well designed, too, being everything you could want in a tool for extracting songs from CDs and arranging them on CDs of your own. Plus it includes a really great psychedelic test pattern generator built right in. I'm something of a connoisseur of "eye candy", and I gotta say, iTunes provides the best I've ever seen. So, I'm digging it.

As for Alison, she's been out in the yard a lot lately, doing spring planting and other gardening stuff, including starting to dig a stream. She's also started biking to her job at a local flower shop, which recently went through a change in ownership, which has made things there kinda weird... but the new management has also given her dominance over the unused greenhouse, which is cool.

And so, another week passes here at Wunderland.Earth.

Happy spring!