January 07, 2005

Got it!

Alice catching tail on scratching post

Second in the occasional Friday Cat Blogging series. That's Alice playing her favorite game: Catch the Tail. The picture is old, from November of 2000, but she still does this any time she comes across a precarious perch, the higher off the floor the better.

BTW, I don't have a good reference monitor at the moment. Leave me a comment or send me email and let me know whether that picture is too light or too dark or just right in your preferred viewing environment.

Wow, it's been quiet around here, hasn't it? We drove to CA the Monday after Xmas to see family and returned this last Monday. With Rachel and Becky and me all taking turns behind the wheel, the 14-hour drive is almost (but not quite) tolerable. At least we were blessed with decent weather in both directions.

Read on for more tales of woe...

When we got back our phone was out. I did the usual troubleshooting and discovered that there is no phone box on the outside of our house. It might be in the crawl space, I'll have to check the next time I'm down there (not soon, please!) Anyway, Qwest came out and found that the problem was at their box where one of our wires had corroded away and broken.

Unfortunately while the phone service came back, the DSL didn't. I got on the phone to their support line and we were able to get the windows box to talk to the network by changing the TCP/IP settings to use 10BaseT instead of the default. Qwest is not interested in determining why this was necessary, nor in determining how to get my wireless access point to talk to their router again. The only way they could get the iBook to talk to it was to hard-wire to the router and use a fixed IP address. The support weenies contend that the fact that these kluges will let my computes talk to the internet proves that there is no problem with their systems and that I should leave them alone and surf the net over a cable like a good little luser. I don't think so!

Anyway, that's all by way of pointing out (unnecessarily, I'm sure) that I've been spending way too much time playing amateur network engineer and way too little playing at being a blogger. Hopefully I can get this junk sorted this weekend and maybe be able to post a couple book reviews and a glove or two in the near future. And catch up on the hundreds of posts in my aggregators.

Posted by jeffy at January 7, 2005 08:13 PM
Comments

On my iBook G4 the photo looks perfect. How long does she stay up there like that? Was it a split second at which you happened to snap the shot, or did you have time to go get the camera? You could enter this very cool photo in a competition!

Posted by: Katherine at January 8, 2005 09:27 AM

Thanks Katherine!

The "Catch the Tail" game goes on for quite a while, but it's a pretty dynamic game, especially on the scratching post like this with lots of almost falling off and scrambling and falling off and jumping back up and trying and trying to catch that darn tail. When it's caught like this it only stays caught for a few seconds. I keep meaning to try to get some video because it's pretty funny to watch.

Posted by: jeffy at January 8, 2005 01:25 PM