Just as I was extolling the virtues of technology advances a few posts down, my DSL connection dies.

Its been down all afternoon, and seems to be down for the count. The Verizon people say that they'll check things at the office tomorrow to see if they have a hardware problem, but if not, they'll send someone out Saturday with a new DSL modem (that isn't really a modem, but what are you gonna do?), because they say mine is a little obsolete, so that might be the problem.

I'm typing this from my laptop on a modem. If I can figure out how to share the connection and operate from my other machine, I'll be semi normal, but I hate the keyboard on the laptop.

Right now my focus is on getting my column finished and shipped to Fox for tomorrow.

For what it's worth, when my DSL was down for more than 3 weeks, it turned out to be a problem with my network card. Of course, they could have figured this out the first day by pinging it, but that would have made too much sense.

It's not a NIC problem. I verified that before calling them. When the lights aren't blinking properly (or rather, on steadily) on the Fujitsu "modem," you know that the problem is in that device or something upstream from it--not in your own network.

And miracle of miracles, even as I'm typing this, it's come back up...

Thanks.