We are the Matrix

Started: 2003-02-24 12:14:35

Submitted: 2003-02-24 12:46:08

Visibility: World-readable

At the moment, I'm sitting in the church office behind Gem, who is in the process of organizing the office after the chaos of this morning. The DSL connection to the rest of the world broke sometime over the weekend, so it fell to Gem to fix it when she came into work this morning. Gem called me for tech support twice, the first time to double-check that she had done everything she could to diagnose the problem before calling real tech support, and the second time to figure out why she couldn't get a link light when she plugged the modem straight into the computer's Ethernet port. I suggested perhaps a crossover cable would be a good idea, so Gem came home to borrow my homemade crossover. I decided it would be a reasonable idea for me to come along with her, since I could amuse myself with Elssbett (which would probably be a good idea anyway, since I need to journal and I can keep myself far away from most distractions on an unteathered box sitting on my lap) and I could do much better with tech support in person anyway. Gem let me drive back to church, since she doesn't like driving when it has snowed lately. (We got three or four inches since yesterday morning, which was fun, especially driving Willy to school at 0700 this morning.)

Gem plugged in my crossover cable and got a link light. (The church has a Cisco DSL box that combines the modem (for lack of a better word) and a personal NAT, DHCP, and DNS box. It features a serial management port, which came in handy when we reset the box; the same thing is also available by telnetting to the box.) I verified that I could ping the box, but I couldn't ping the outside world. Gem called tech support and talked for at least ninety minutes. Most of it involved playing with Windows TCP/IP settings, which was completely worthless, since I had already concluded that we could ping up until the DSL box. While Gem was endlessly rebooting Windows XP, I figured out that I could telnet to the box and reach the handy management console. It included its own ping and traceroute tools, with which I verified that I couldn't reach the outside world. Ninty minutes later, tech support finally came to realize that I was right and that the problem was not on our end. The issue has been passed on to the appropriate tech support group and may be resolved sometime in the mid-range future.

Saturday afternoon I ran PA for Chuck Wilson's memorial service. He was shot Wednesday night, 12 February, during an apparent robbery at the gas station he was working at in Longmont. He was 86 years old and an all-round nice old guy in the church. I think this counts as the first time I played an integral part in an event that was reported in the next day's local newspaper. (I'd hunt down the article's url if I were online at the moment, but I'm not, so I won't.)

I have concluded that we are in an alternate version of the Matrix in which Cypher succeeded in his mission and ended up back in the Matrix as a Foleys clerk. Yesterday Gem and I headed to Foleys to use up some of our credit by acquiring a tablecloth for our new table. (I spent most of the day throwing my junk that has collected in the space outside my basement cubicle into boxes, clearing off enough space to put the table. Mom decided she wanted it out of the living room, which I suppose I can understand.) After successfully locating three tablecloths (one on 75% off clearance from Christmas), we found a cashier who looked like Cypher and sounded exactly like him. As we walked back to Yoda, I said, "He reminded me of," and Gem finished my sentence with "Cypher."