Struck By Lightning

We had a pretty exciting lightning storm here on Sunday. C was a little frightened but watching AFV was a good distraction. There may have been one or two brownouts causing a number of UPSes around the house to beep, but not much else. Monday morning everything was fine, until just a few minutes before we all left the house there was another brownout and then our Internet stopped working.

It wasn't working again by 3pm Monday so I walked over to the ISP, Cactus Computer (aka turbonet.com). They blamed the phone company, Frontier, and said that about 25% of their customers using Frontier wiring were affected. That evening I rigged up a soekris box in the window to "borrow" some Internet from a neighbor using a different ISP.

Tuesday wasn't any better. There was a rumour that Frontier fixed their sh!t, but nothing was working at our house.

Wednesday morning we're still down. I went to Cactus again to get an update. Still the phone company's problem, etc, lots of people working on it, etc, etc. Just around Noon it started working again. Hooray.

Ironically, the most recent newsletter from Cactus talks about how you should really lock down your wifi access points so that your neighbors or others don't steal from you. I'm glad my neighbor didn't, and plan to return the favor by unlocking ours again.