Loosing your internet connectivity can sometimes be considered a forcible break from the hustle and bustle of life on the net…. unless you work from home. Last week my Comcast Internet connectivity started tweeking on me. Network speeds dropped significantly but I brushed it away as network troubles or upgrades or something. The speed issues got worse and worse to the point that just logging into a system via ssh took minutes. We did some major internal network changes last week and getting anything done was a massive struggle making a tense situation really painful and extremely frustrating. Friday afternoon the network just crapped out completely.

My cable TV has experienced problems as well, with a heavily distorted picture (the tell-tale digital “pixelization” effect). No TV and no network has meant a lot of family time, which is good, but I’m falling behind in my workloads significantly.

Finally today someone from Comcast came out and as it turns out there is a problem with my network tap off the main-line. His diagnostics showed network signal rising and falling widely but doing so in the lower end of the range, all below 30%. And the crappy thing is that apparently replacing that tap requires a specialist, all of which are off until after the holiday weekend.

Working out of a Starbucks sucks. I’m in one as I post this. How people do it on a normal basis I don’t know. Just working on a MacBook is a strain for me… its so confided, unlike my monster Solaris box(es) at home which assist in work.

So anyway, I’m off the net until Tuesday. Anyone waiting for stuff from me should keep waiting.

I will say that one upshot besides all the family time is that you really can focus when you don’t have Google, Wikipedia, mailing lists, email, and otherthings available to you. I’ve been improving my e-mail skills lately and having nothing but the Cyrus SASL and Postfix source tarballs to get you through a test installation helps to keep you from getting side-tracked. 😉