Ivan broke my DSL

Have to write something to move Marisa down the page. So taking time away from my Sunday install crew suprevision to post from the office as the computing situation from home is, well, poor.

Ivan visited Western PA on Friday. My commute home which is typically 20 minutes was closer to two hours. Roads were blocked by floods and mudslides, and those that weren't were clogged bumper to bumper with traffic trying to avoid the floods and the mudslides. Allegheny county set an all time record for rain that day with close to 6 inches. At least the original prediction of "four days of rain" didn't hold up, even though it felt like we got four days of rain in about six hours.

All things being equal we faired very well. The gutters didn't fall off the house and the basement stayed dry. The creek out back become a swift flowing brooke and probably swelled to 10 times its normal size. We think it would have to swell to like 1000 times its normal size to endanger the house though. Considering what we see on the TV and hear on the radio others in the area got it much much worse. The borough of Carnegie had 4 feet of water on their main street. Just about all the businesses in the community were decimated.

The worst on our end? Our phone now sounds like early communication to the moon. Hard to motivate a company to repair static on the line when a significant portion of their customers have no service at all. But, dirty lines mean no DSL, and trying to use the standard modem connection got me 4800 baud which I have to say is now obsolete as far as contemporary software is concerned.

At least the cable isn't out.

So, curse you hurricane Ivan for breaking my connection with the outside world (oh yeh and ruining the lives of all those other people - that sucks too).