The day after YAPC, we went to the Apple store to get a brand-spanking-new iBook (with max RAM and AirPort, of course ;-). It's been really great so far. Now the fun begins: installing all of the software I just can live without on a new laptop (and installing it over a dialup connection): fink, XDarwin, Mozilla, TeX, various Perls, other programming languages, etc. :-)
Mid-way through the pdftex download on Saturday, my connectivity went dead. Looking further into it, I saw that I had a link, but no packets going out or coming back. This happens occasionally, so I tried to hang up and dial back out again. No luck.
After a day without the network (and a rather useless 802.11 link), I called my ISP, fuming about the loss of connectivity.
Turns out that the DC-area POP is suffering from an outage at the moment; someone cut a fiber link on Saturday, and there's no ETA as of yet on when the link will be back up. That means the DC dialup numbers can't authenticate, nor can anything "close" to DC: Maryland/Virgina suburbs, Baltimore, etc. The closest POP that I found still working is in Philadelphia; probably something closer, but nothing within a local calling plan. So much for the internet being about fault tolerance...
