I have decided to abandon internet telephony, and subscribed to cellphone service earlier today. There seem to be some technical difficulties, and my new phone isn’t working yet. I suspect that my old prepaid phone is low on minutes, and I will not be adding more minutes to it, so until my new phone works, I will be effectively phoneless.

Since the new phone has an answering service, I will be treating it more as a home phone than as a cellphone (i.e. not carrying it around with me quite so often).

My website has been updated with the new phone number.

Now that most of the boats at my club are hauled out, I have moved to a mooring closer to the clubhouse. This provides a shorter walk to the showers (now that the weather is getting less pleasant), to the tender, and an internet signal strong enough to be usable in my cabin.

So far, I have been unable to reproduce my previous success making my internet telephony box work. All of the settings on all the relevant hardware (over which I have any control) are the same. I seem to have adequate bandwidth, and reasonably low latency (and a sufficiently non-standard setup to render any technical support from the service provider completely useless)

If the internet telephony remains unreliable, I will abandon it, and my prepaid cellphone in favour of a cellphone with a proper subscription.

At this point, I’d like to believe that my continually referring people to my website for contact information, will prevent the resulting changes in phone number from being too problematic. I’d like to believe this, but I don’t.

I just got my internet telephony service working from a location close enough to the club’s antenna to get decent connectivity.

I still do not have a usable wireless signal in my cabin, so the only practical change is that I have set up my voicemail on my VOIP number, and that I know the service to work with the type of connection I intend to give it.

I may still have issues with reliability.

Having added my LJ username to the contact information provided on my website, I have decided to protect most of my entries as friends-only in order to maintain this policy.

It appears that all the electricty that my computers (currently colocated with a friend living in his mom’s basement) consume is starting to get noticed. This means I get to start looking for a new home for them before they start getting turned off (by the mother, and then turned back on by the friend, but possibly not until after I want to use them) on a regular basis.

This is simultaneously a request for a new location (one with unmetered electricity please; I don’t want the machines to wear out their welcome like this again), and a warning that my email may become unreliable again.

a few days back, the hard drive on the firewall connecting my mailserver to the internet died. i was expecting to have to spend the better part of a day, and a nontrivial amount of money, fixing it (and have to catch a water taxi home). somehow, i managed to get a working system going on Yet Another Spare Disk Of Leandro’s, in about 4 hours, and i was able to catch the club tender home (and not even on its last run!)

this was pleasing.

this was also why any mail sent to me in the past few days has not yet received any response. it’s still trickling in.

a pair of flies just had sex on my keyboard. they do not appear to have left any mess.

i now have working rights in just about the entire western industrial world.

i am still a credential whore.

within the past month or so, i’ve gotten a few cues to resume using livejournal.
i checked, and my reason for stopping appears to be gone.

it looks like my highly intermittent posts, and somewhat less intermittent replies just might be back.