There's been quite a gap in our weblog, and only some of it is due to laziness. Our internet access has been thrown off kilter over the last week or two by an unusual accident.
You see, in my office, I have an aquarium on my back desk. It's just a small 10 gallon job with some small fish. It also has, or rather had a large plecostamus - that's one of those big, brown bottom-feeder type guys. Ugly cuss named Cameron - 'bout 9 inches long. Of all the fish, he was my favorite.
A couple of feet away on the desk is a cool little device that is our cable modem, firewall, router, print server and wireless access point. Nifty, eh? All that stuff in one stylish case.
Ok, so here's where things went awry. At about 1:00am, Sheri and I were both checking email on our laptops before we turned in. The internet "went away," but we both assumed it was a passing glitch. We went to bed, believing all would be right in the morning when I started work. It wasn't.
So I spent the next hour or so looking at the cable modem, rebooting it, etcetera. Nothing seemed to work. It had simply forgotten how to be what it was. I was stumped.
As I sat back in my chair, I took a casual look at the aquarium. No Cameron. Doublecheck ... yep, he's gone. I looked between the desk and the wall, and there he was. Right ... behind ... the modem. Ah. Two mysteries solved.
As best we can figure, at about 1:00am Cameron decided to go walkies and leapt out the really small gap in the aquarium lid next to the filter. He must've landed on the modem. The modem was not prepared to have a sopping wet 9 inch fish drop on it. Manufacturer's defect, obviously. Cameron then slid or flopped down behind the desk. When I found him at 10:00am the next morning, he was still alive, but just barely. I picked him up with kitchen tongs (couldn't get my arm between the desk and wall) and put him back in the tank.
Interestingly, this wasn't the first time he had pulled this particular stunt. On the first occasion, he had only been about 3 inches long and had only been out for 45 minutes or so. He recovered fine after that episode, but this time the story did not end happily. Within a few minutes he had stopped breathing. RIP - Cameron the fish - and one cable modem.
All those features in one box seemed like a good idea, until they all went away at the same time. Over the last few days we've patched together our systems with old hardware and we're back online.
Wish I could say the same for Cameron...
--Paul