Month: August 2021

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One of Those Movies…

…that, along with Cabin in the Woods and The Fifth Element, if I happen across it while channel surfing, I will almost always stop and watch, no matter where in the story it might be.

Silent Hill (2006) dir. Christopher Gans

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Too Dependent

Our power went out yesterday afternoon. It's happened 3 or 4 times since we moved into this townhouse, and it usually comes back up within a minute or so.

It was no different yesterday. The power went out and came back on before I could even turn around to shut anything off. Everything started back up except the internet. Our Orbi cable modem/router was blinking and showing a solid purple glow. We powered it off a couple times, disconnected everything, and powered it back up with no success.

Great, I thought. It's fried.

Ben—bless his heart—called Cox (aka a trip to the Ninth Level of Hell). They could see the modem, and in fact, successfully sent reset commands. Each time it got to the point right before the final connect and the blinking would never stop. If left in that state, eventually it would start glowing purple, indicating—according to the folks at Netgear—indicated there was a problem connecting to the cable company. Well duh.

Cox was of no help. The girl, while sympathetic, had run through her troubleshooting scripts and suggested that we "go buy a $30 modem to verify that it's not your hardware."

Where, exactly, does one locate a THIRTY DOLLAR modem/router?

Ben ended up and Best Buy and came home with the cheapest modem/router he could find—at $145. "At least," he said, "we have 30 days to return it if it doesn't work either."

We hooked everything up and once again, Cox was unable to initialize the device. Well, that was a relief. Our nearly new Orbi wasn't at fault.

They agreed to send out a technician—if we signed up for the monthly maintenance plan first. (The representative basically refused to roll a truck without that service plan being in place.)

Needless to say our collective blood pressures were going through the roof.

Initially they'd scheduled a visit for tomorrow afternoon. Then the rep said that time slot had disappeared when she went to reserve it. So it was pushed out to Tuesday. She assured us we were on the calendar.

Our connectivity wasn't completely cut off. Cox has a hotspot network in place that customers can tap into (this is how I'm posting today). It's slow, but at least it works. We also have hotspots on our phones, but neither of those options are viable solutions for using Apple TV.

We left the new modem connected overnight since that was the one now on our account, and I figured if it decided to sort itself out overnight we'd go ahead and swap the Orbi back in and call The Ninth Circle of Hell again to get that put back on the account.

Unfortunately it still wasn't working, and in fact, when Ben went online to look at our account, there was no record of our scheduled Tuesday visit, prompting yet another call to Cox. We now have a service call scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.

I was already scheduled to work from home tomorrow, and I can tether my work laptop to my personal hotspot, so I'm not going to have to go into the office—not that I can because of the service appointment. The connection is slow as fuck, so how it all plays out tomorrow is going to be interesting to say the least.

This episode has pointed out how dependent we've become upon our wireless connection. Our smart plugs, thermostat, and garage door opener are now offline. Everything still works, but everything needs to be done manually again.

I'm getting really tired of all this bullshit.

Fuck. Just fuck.

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Triptych

I know this guy is going to be the winner in the next most-overexposed-performer category (and that I'm contributing to that), but damn if he isn't pretty…

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I Need to Let It Go

It's been nine months since the fire, and still—every now and then—I'm unexpectedly hit with an overwhelming sense of loss. Yes, I know we all got out safely and probably 85% of our things were salvaged or replaced with new, but occasionally I'm caught unawares by the thought of something in that other 15% and it just devastates me.

Case in point, this morning I was listening to my "Winter 2016" music mix (prompted by a friend to whom I'd sent it on CD back in the day asking for a new track list last week), and seeing there were several soundtrack cuts in the mix, I remembered that my hasty decision to just let all my DVDs get crated off to the dump in the aftermath of the fire was a horrible, horrible mistake. There were several in the collection that I wished I'd kept; notably gifts from Ben: Westworld,  Preacher, and lord knows how many others. Then there were all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the short-lived Caprica series, a copy of The Martian that we bought on a whim and brought home for a date night, and dozens of others that are now just gone. Blame for losing them lays squarely on my shoulders, even though at the time I didn't deem them important enough to keep.

And then there was the box of CDs in my den closet, something that I would have rescued if I'd remembered they were there. I hadn't played any of them in years, having digitized everything, but many of them had extreme sentimental value. Some I'd owned for thirty or more years and were part of the "don't sell no matter how dire your financial situation becomes" collection. All gone; realized only after the salvage company had gone through the place and they were not on the "salvage and restore" list—or, frankly, the disposal list either. So god only knows what happened to them.

So I'm in a bit of a funk today.