el rinconcito

Since the first time I got online many years ago, chat is still my favorite thing.

I had two chat windows open this afternoon. One was a friend in Iran, another was in Russia. At the same moment, an e-mail rolls in from Cuba. It was all coincidence, but my partner walks by, sees the screen, chuckles and says, "why don't you add Libya and North Korea while you're at it." I said, "if I could, I would!"

It's all what I like about the net.

Here's a photo tour of the messy, tangled, snarl of wires that runs the Internet to my house. It's a slow day here that I'm taking pictures of such things.

All images are clickable for closer inspection. Select "all sizes" upon landing on the flickr page.

Image #1: The ugly-as-hell utility poles marching the lines down the street towards my house (and everyone's house on this and several other streets) Ugly!


Image #2: This mess is at the end of my driveway where the lines split off to me. The thick black cable on the bottom is telephone. The silver cable higher up brings in the net and TV. Electric cables are higher up.


Image #3: An ugly snarl over my driveway. When one utility comes to work on their stuff, they don't care about what happens to the others, hence, this snarl that will wear and eventually disable something. One of the lines is telephone, which I don't use anyway.


Image #4: The TV/net coax does a loop then slides down the side of the house. A lot of pics (ahem!) have flowed through this baby.


Image #5: The box where the TV/net cables "do things" (get split, I guess), then run under the house with many spiders and snakes. There's a warning not to open the box under penalty of castration.


Image #6: The black cable modem and the VoIP telephone box beside it. I disconnected my old "copper wire" telephone due to non-cooperation and inflexibility from the phone company.


Image #7: The router. Some things here are wireless, some wired.


Image #8: One of the devices (my computer!) that is hooked to the aforementioned stuff.


Image #9: Here some of the data becomes luxurious video on a screen! Everything on the screen was downloaded, right down to the operating system itself. We're all masters of downloading here.

There seemed to be a major net outage this afternoon starting around 18:00 GMT lasting about 45 minutes. The fact that we even noticed it means we're online way too much.

About 3/4 of the sites we usually hit were unreachable. It seems to be over now. Resuming the downloading.

By the way, if you're a time freak, like I am, wikipedia has good stuff on GMT and timekeeping at this link.

Outage report from the storm center:

Level3 Outage: confirmed
Published: 2008-12-28,
Last Updated: 2008-12-28 18:25:20 UTC
by Raul Siles (Version: 3)
0 comment(s)

An ISC reader wrote in to let us know about a current Level3 outage based on Internet Health Report. It seems the main issues are with its Detroit origin, although St. Louis seems to be affected too, probably as a consequence of the former one. In fact (although not necessarily directly related), Level3 main web page is not available: http://www.level3.com.

UPDATE: (UTC, Sunday, December 28, 2008 at 18:21:00) During the last few minutes we have confirmed the Level3 issues with several ISC readers. Thank you to all who wrote in to let us know and confirm it!

If you have any additional information about the real reason for this, please, let us know.