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So we got tired of Comcast's "whatever we feel like" pricing structure, and since Fios has recently come to our town, we thought we'd switch to Verizon. Of course, we're nerds and we have servers and we need a static IP. So I spent a long time on the phone with the salespeople about that, and came to an agreement.

Here comes the installer. Sets up the phone, plugs in all of his routers, I say something about static IP, and he says "the static IP goes in our router. If you want to have a static IP for your server, you have to buy more of them." I'm like, "the point of static IP is for to get to be on our server, not your router." He swears this is how it works. We have voice over IP with some special box, because it's cheaper than having "voice line", and that's how come it's going to use up our static IP. We could put the voice box behind our server, but we don't really want all of the traffic to go through our server. It's not optimized for that. So we say "how much does it cost per month to get these extra IP's?" And the answer is $20. Which is kind of related to the amount of money we're saving over Comcast. So we're really not excited about this. We were like "why doesn't the salesperson know this", and the installer says "we tell them over and over but they never listen".

We are sad, thinking about calling the salesperson tomorrow to bitch and moan and say bait and switch. But then, after dinner, having been fortified, Ken connects to their router just to see what you can do with its configurations. And there is a menu item called "DMZ host", which apparently is a thing that allows you to do pretty much exactly what we need: the router gets the static IP, and any traffic that it doesn't understand it just forwards directly to the host. Which means that it understands the phone traffic, and it understands whatever it's doing with NAT for your random other machines that are connecting to the Internet, but anything it doesn't understand, like a network packet to your mail server, goes to the server.

Why the installer doesn't know this, I don't know. Male Answer Syndrome? If he had, there would've been a lot less stress. So we will use this set up for a day or two and then cancel Comcast. Hopefully in the day or two we will learn if there are any gotchas.

We decided to watch a DVD. We have a DVD player, we have an old television, and we have a VCR player of not too dissimilar vintage from the DVD player. With some effort we were able to get the old TV to emit sound consistently and video inconsistently from the DVD. By inconsistent, I mean it played video for 10 seconds, and then cut out for 20. Corresponding sound was perfect.

So, I decided to use instead my monitor and my laptop, which does not have a DVD player, but we do have a USB DVD player that I could use.

Problem one: DVD player has 2 USB plugs, with a 5 inch cord between them. The manufacturer of my laptop decided to put the 2 USB ports on opposite sides of the computer so they're 12 inches apart. Fortunately, we have a USB extender. (Also, just for playing, it may not need both ports.)

Problem two: the DVD is old, and it comes with some software which says it will install on your Windows machine and allow you to watch the video. The software was written for Windows XP, and does not run on Windows 10.

Fortunately, I was able to download a player which does run on Windows 10 and does read these files, and so we will be able to watch the video.

ICYC, it's homework for my housemate who has never seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I want to go see the new Indiana Jones and the Money Hungry Movie Producer movie and she plans to tag along.

Now that we have the tech dealt with, we will watch it another day.

I'm like way behind on everything. Like blogging. And bicycling. Spending three ideal bicycling weeks in California did a number on my progress towards my target. And we've been having for work disaster after work disaster and so I'm getting fewer miles on the days I do bicycle. I'm kind of doubtful that I will bicycle 317 miles in the next 57 days.

I went waterskiing two weeks ago, and it's going to be 70 freaking degrees tomorrow and the water is still 60 degrees, so maybe we will go again. Years ago I swore off waterskiing in November, because it was "just too cold", but I guess climate change changed that. It's going to be kind of windy, so I might change my mind about actually going. We should remove the boat from the water and winterize it, though, regardless of whether we actually ski. I suppose I should windsurf instead!

I ran an in-person event! It was that square dance that I've been attending for decades, which took two years off. It was a total success (except for one person who got Covid, but we think it was on the flight home, not at the dance.) Some people wore masks, and some people didn't, and everybody tested every morning, and it seemed like it was okay, and everybody had a good time, and enough people came to pay the callers a living wage.

I'm sort of curious what will happen with twitter. If it turns into a pit of slime and my timeline is no longer interesting to read, then I will quit doing it. Otherwise I will continue. I'm not going to try to make a political statement about it.

I'm scanning a bunch of photos of my mom. I'm kind of trying to make one of those do-it-yourself books, ideally before December holidays so I can give it as a present to various friends and family. But instead of organizing the photos and writing captions and stuff, here I am blogging.

In the past I've had a policy of blogging only my 20+ mile rides, which means that I don't blog very much anymore because mostly I don't ride that much anymore. But, last weekend I rode 19.25, and yesterday I rode 18.75, and today I rode 16.4, so I'm not a complete slacker. 933 for the year, which seems to be on track for 2000.

Friday I got a flat! It was a very slow leak, so when I noticed something felt funny and got off, and found the tire was very soft, I just pumped it up and continued my ride (less than 2 miles to go), and arrived home with some air still in the tire. So yesterday morning, before my 18.75, I had to repair said flat. The little itty bitty hole was easy to find in a bucket of water, and the patch went on nicely, and the tire is still quite firm today after my recent rides. Maybe I should stock a spare tire in the garage, though, since when you've had one flat, often it means you're about to have a bunch of them and you should replace your tire. Unfortunately I don't seem to have written down the size of my wheel, and it is not written on either the tire or the wheel. How annoying.

Yesterday's ride involved stopping at the vet for some drugs for my cat, and I always enjoy riding my bicycle to the vet. Get some double takes in the parking lot. "Does she have her cat in that?" Kind of like when I take the boat gas tank to the gas station using my bicycle.

Yesterday's ride also involved stopping at Kohl's, where I bought my watch many years ago, but they don't sell watches anymore to speak of. They are replacing it with Sephora, which is a makeup thing. So they had construction rather than sales in that space.

I thought about buying an Apple watch, since I now have an iPhone, but I'm thinking I will be sad in bright sunlight when I can't see the time. There are reviews which complain about this problem. So I might just try to get a Timex again. I really like highly accurate, so it doesn't lose very many seconds per year, and I like setting forward and backward. I don't really need any other features – I don't use it as an alarm, I don't need to do stopwatch. So my current watch, a Timex Ironman, is way beyond my needs, but it is highly accurate, and sets forward and backward. Unfortunately the buttons have become nearly impossible to push, probably some corrosion inside from "these things aren't really waterproof"; there was a time several years ago where water got inside and the display didn't work at all for a week, but then it mostly cleared up and it's been working great, except that the buttons have been very slowly getting more and more difficult to push. So, if I never went to California, it would be great. It's about six seconds off. The last time I set the seconds was two or three years ago.

So I got this iPhone, with the idea that "everything would be great because it is new and modern". It turns out that it's so modern, that it really really really wants to figure out some other way to produce sound than it talking. So far, I have had to tell it not to use Bluetooth to give me directions (the radio was not playing in the car, so it was not speaking), not to use car play when I plugged in the phone to charge it (I think I should have just allowed it to do so, because there were two places, one in the car and one in the phone, that I had to tell it to shut up, and it just decided not to talk after that and I had to pull over and restart navigation after unplugging it), and the strangest thing was that somehow the sound had gotten to be at zero, and in order to get it to listen to the volume up button, it had to be speaking, but I didn't know when that was going to be given that the volume was zero. Turns out if you just start navigation, it starts to talk, and if you start pushing the volume up button you can suddenly start hearing it. I had to ask the Internet for this trick. Anyway, the result of this is that I don't trust it to continue to give me directions, because it might just suddenly decide that there must be some better thing to do than talk, and so it shuts up and the better thing isn't really connected…

My iPhone came yesterday. It was supposed to come on Friday, but thanks to the US Postal Service, it was late.

I've been playing with it on Wi-Fi only for a little bit, kind of getting used to it and installing some apps like from my bank, and decided that now would be a good time to try putting my sim in.

Unfortunately, I need a nano sim, and I have a micro sim. So I have to contact my provider, and hopefully they will be able to send me one moderately soon, and maybe they will use a more reliable shipping method.

Today, my work said we could all come in and get our stuff which has been sequestered for three months, and also we could borrow equipment from our desks. I borrowed my chair, my docking station, and my monitor (although I recently purchased a new monitor, so I'm not sure if I'm going to use the one I borrowed.) I also brought home all my personal stuff, because who knows what's going to happen, and if I have completely cleaned out my desk, then if they want to reorganize the office space, they can just do it. If they lay me off, or if I quit, you would think that would also make it easier, but presumably I would have to return the borrowed equipment in that case, so I'd have to go there anyway. Hopefully neither of these things will happen; I'm unlikely to quit, because getting another job would be quite the pain, in addition to the fact that I really hate working full time. I've been working nearly fulltime -- 6-7 hours a day, and that's really all I ever had in me. Maybe normal humans also are like that, and it would be considered full time anyway. I really don't know.

Anyway, it required a trip up to Waltham, 45 minutes each way, and I got to listen to the radio. I kind of miss listening to the radio while commuting; I never really wanted to do it for as many hours as I always did each week, but once a week is good. Once a month is too little.

On the way home, I stopped at a friend's house, and sold her a Black Lives Matter sign (prearranged). We still have four left, and I think we're going to just keep them, although it's probably better to get them out there, than to keep one for theft remediation.

While I was away, we had a lightning strike near home, and it fried two things: the Comcast modem, and our home server. So for a couple of hours we camped on the neighbors xfinity, and then Comcast got us a new modem. Meanwhile, Ken was researching the options for replacing the server. We had hoped we would be able to just plug in the disk and reboot, but the guy at microcenter said that would not work. So now our hope is to get linux on it, and get it to read the other disk. This is not trivial, because windows machines really don't want you to run anything besides windows… Anyway, I had another nice drive up to Cambridge, listening to the radio. There was some concern about getting there before they closed, but I had 15 minutes, and was not the last customer checking out.

And now so is my phone. I had the barfs all night. So that means I need to wash everything on my bed and everything I've worn recently. Unfortunately, I washed my phone with some blankets!

I guess, assuming it dries out and isn't completely hosed, at least it probably doesn't have any germs left... If it is completely hosed, I'll have to work harder on getting some new phone, since it's too old runs Android 4. Way too often I can't get to web sites due to ssl problems. I don't know how to make it get new certificates or run better algorithms; it doesn't automatically update any of those things. So, sadness. If I were more of a hacker I'd learn how to run cyanogen or something. But I'm really not interested.

So, my new computer only had 2GB. That wasn't enough so I googled what kind of memory to get, and bought it. Then I followed the tedious instructions to install -- one card goes under the keyboard and it was a royal pain.

Guess what? It Didn't Boot. Little flashy lights, we (with another computer!) googled about the flashy lights and the code is "RAM error". Right. So, first I tried to re-seat the cards, since one web page said it was tricky, and when that didn't work, I put back in the old cards. Trying hard to seat them well. Guess what? It Didn't Boot! Crap.

So I'm using Perry's old computer until I have a chance to take the brick to a computer fixit shop. Maybe they'll have better luck, hopefully with the new memory. It's been a few weeks since I actually received the new memory, I wonder if they'll take it back if it's the wrong kind? Hopefully the computer isn't really a brick.

Sigh.