I have closed Railwolf Labs. It wasn’t really interesting for most people, and I was just wasting my time working on it. I won’t be doing as much PHP scripting now, either, as I’m focusing on writing songs and stories.
The only thing that was interesting to visitors at Railwolf Labs; the machine status page, has been moved here to Railwolf.com. It’s much more simple now, since I don’t run PHP scripts through WordPress, but it will do just fine. I think it looks better now, too.
Well, the internet troubles didn’t last quite as long as they did last time, but I still wasn’t able to use ICQ until 9 PM or so last night. By that time, none of my contacts were online, of course… 
Since I had some spare time, I decided to finish up the WordPress theme. All that was left to do was to make the sidebar and widgetize it. That didn’t take too long, except – for some reason – the default sidebar uses a different style than the widgets, so I had to edit the stylesheet a bit to make it look as it did before. I also got rid of the huge archive list, since nobody really uses that anyway other than search engine bots. I might add the archives as a page or as a dropdown list in the sidebar… or are they really needed?
It’s ridiculous, but I’m having the same problems with my internet connection as I had last week. The exact same routing issue to the same websites! Obviously, whatever they did last week didn’t really resolve the problems. And this time, it happens earlier in the day, at around 2PM on a Saturday afternoon. A very bad time for it to happen for me, because it’s when I use those websites and ICQ the most.
I can’t use ICQ and I’m not happy at all, because ICQ itself has enough problems without the Bell beavers causing even more of their own. Routers are not a place to build dams. 
Today, I received a package from Amazon.ca. I was expecting this shipment to take at least a couple of weeks because a couple of CDs were not in stock, but they managed to get it to me pretty fast. Can’t complain about that.
Here’s what I got:
Today is quite a hot day, it’s 33°C / 91°F, and that’s without accounting for the humidity. So, it’s hot, but actually, it’s hotter than this is most places in Russia, and has been for pretty much the whole month so far.
I didn’t feel too well yesterday. I wasn’t as hot as today, but my father had turned off the air conditioner again, since the window installers still had to install some trim and put on caulking, and my mother wanted the air conditioner to be protected as if it were made of gold.
He should have asked the workers to finish the window by the air conditioner first thing in the morning, so that he could get the air conditioner running again, but he didn’t think about that. So, the whole house was getting pretty hot by noon, in the hot southern sun. I decided to drink some tea when I got up, which turned out to be a mistake… 
Today, some new windows were installed. No, not software, but actual windows for the house
The bay window in the living room was in need of replacement, as were the two windows in the dining room. Now that those are done, it means that all of the original windows have been replaced.
I didn’t sleep very well with the orchestra of hammers, but I also had some bad back pain, and it started to get a bit hot because my father had turned off the air conditioner. One of the windows is right next to the air conditioner…
So, my appointment with the Chiropractor today was very good timing. My back was pretty bad, but that didn’t surprise me too much with the kind of pain I had today.
I actually did some writing last night and early this morning, for the first time in weeks. I realized that my main story still needs some more interesting scenes, and some reworking of some other scenes since those changes I had made to the beginning of the story, but I had no inspiration until now. I had an idea to fit in some elements of unique experiences I’ve had in my life to go along with the purely fictional parts. That seems to be working, and it should make the character more realistic and more interesting.
My internet is now running normally. It seems that Bell resolved the routing problems at around 3AM, which is about 9 hours after the problems started. Although some sites started working again at about 1AM, ICQ and Amazon were the last to come back. I’m glad it’s over now.
Also, the cables outside have vanished. Apparently, the cable company has buried the cables sometime yesterday morning. It didn’t really take that long for them to do this, since I didn’t even notice until they were gone. I don’t know how they got the cable under our driveway to reach the neighbour, but it doesn’t appear to have been damaged in any way. Strange.
I’ve been having some problems with my internet connection. I cannot connect to certain websites, but many still work fine. It seems to be a routing issue, as the DNS resolves fine. Some of the websites affected include Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo, ICQ, etc. and I’m not quite sure how they’re related, but traffic might pass through the same router on their way there. Traceroute stops after bx4-montrealak_so-0-0-0.net.bell.ca [64.230.171.46].
So, as there is a routing problem to icq.com, ICQ is not working at all, not just the website. I’m not happy about it, because it’s been about 6 hours now since I was disconnected from it, and I’d like to get back online. Microsoft’s websites and all are working fine, so I can use their Messenger, but most of my contacts only use ICQ…
Perhaps it’s a case of Bell’s beavers eating the wires again?
Originally uploaded by railwolf
I took some photos in the garden tonight, about one hour before sunset. I got some surprisingly good results. I thought this frog garden hose guide peeking out from the plants looked interesting. Check out the rest at Flickr.
I went shopping today. I needed to get a new mouse, because I dropped one and broke the left mouse button. I was using an old mouse to temporarily replace it, but it wore out and I couldn’t left click anymore with that one either 
So, I got a Logitech LX 8 cordless mouse, which as luck has it, works perfectly with my current receiver from the keyboard / mouse combo that the mouse I dropped was from. I also looked at the laptops, but I didn’t see any that I liked. There were almost no laptops with good graphics chips in them. Sure, the Intel chipset has okay graphics for most tasks, but I want something better. My old 16” Toshiba still works, but I need to get a new one, it’s too slow.
I also bought three DVDs:
