No Internet Blues

Vault of Glass

I am on vacation the next two days, so as a result you are getting a post a bit later than normal.  I had every intent of getting up like normal, but the world was rainy…and the bed was warm, and the room nice and dark so I just kept sleeping.  I got up long enough to make my wife some coffee and then went right back to bed, and while I thought I wasn’t really asleep I apparently missed her departure.  I largely survived the moms day festivities and other than getting choked up due to some backwater yokel burning wet leaves…  thing went pretty smoothly.  So much so that I thought we would be back home at a decent hour last night.  My Destiny clan does a Sunday night Retro raid trip through Vault of Glass, and I am in desperate need of an Aetheon kill so that I can finish my No Time To Explain exotic pulse rifle quest.  Generally speaking Sunday is television night in our household, but given that te rest of the day was kinda messed up I decided to take a pass and instead signed up for the raid.  It was going to be awesome to finally have that quest out of my log.

When we got home from an extended dinner/conversation with my parents, I went upstairs and sat down at my computer.  I brought up a single website…  the one that allows me to sign up for a clan event.  When I then turned around and hit the Bungie website to transfer some items I got a no internet connection error in Chrome.  Sure enough I was setting the caution light symbol on my ethernet, and it was around this point that I noticed the cable modem disconnected.  I fiddled a few times to try and get it reconnected, and then hollered down at my wife to check the cable.  Sure enough the television part of the equation was out too.  The biggest frustration is that there was an error messaging showing up on the television with a phone number, but when we called that number and waded their their annoying menu of options, we finally received an answering message stating that the office was closed.  At this point it is 8:30, and the raid starts at 9 pm…  so a mild bit of panic is setting in but there isn’t much I can actually do about it.

Life Without Internet

Thankfully our mobile phones were working because my wife managed to find a different tech support number, and we called that.  Once again we had to wade through a frustrating sequence of message prompts.  We finally get to someone and sure enough there is a major outage in our area, one that is not planned to be resolved until 10:06 so an hour after the start of the raid.  I manage to fiddle with the mobile app for the clan and de-register from the event, and sit there resigned to my fate.  The problem with our modern connected society is that most of the things that I like to do… simply don’t function without internet.  Thankfully I had managed to log into the PS4 before the internet went out and it seemed that Ratchet and Clank didn’t care about having connectivity.  I ended up playing that for a bit until at some point  looked to the side and the blue lights were back on our cable modem.  My Wife verified that in fact we did have cable television back as well, and things seemed pretty peachy.  It seems like they managed to fix the issue by 9:30 instead of 10 something whcih was awesome, but unfortunately the Vault of Glass raid didn’t actually make.

Instead we ended up watching the rebroadcast of Fear the Walking Dead, and then going to bed a it later than we normally do.  Losing internet is this strange roller coaster of emotions which I guess in some way troubles me that this one thing is that important.  We found out that apparently there was a lightning strike that took out a connection point for both the power and cable, and that a large swath of my town was out of power.  I remember the thought going through my head of “Whats the use in having power if we don’t have internet” which when I thought it kinda jarred me.  I guess it was a weird conclusion to what was ultimately a really strange weekend.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad strange, just way busier than we are used to.  On a positive note my “flower children” seem to still be happy and we have failed to kill them off in the week we have had them.  They require way more water than I had originally thought which has me watering both morning and evening to keep them looking healthy.  The “Sunpatiens” especially seem to need a thorough soaking both times to make them nice and happy, which was not something I was expecting.  I had always been told that over watering was just as bad as not watering at all.  However it seems like whatever we ended up with combined with Oklahoma temperatures really need that water.  Hopefully tomorrow I will be back to normal gaming style posts, but this is all I really had for today.