I haven’t dropped off the face of the planet, I have merely been visiting Scotland (there is a difference). Actually it is worse than that, a lot, lot, worse.
Three weeks ago I left for a conference in Scotland followed by a bit of time in France. The conference wireless internet access was provided by British Telecom. Being British Telecom, it worked, but slowly and only in the lobby. At least they had comfortable chairs in the lobby.
A week ago I arrived home, hoping that my home internet access (and telephone) would be restored. Of course it hadn’t. No problem, work still has access. Until Tuesday. Tuesday was the day that everyone migrated behind the Physics Department firewall with four days of “disruption” predicted. Four days later, my laptop is trapped in a private temporary subnet. I can – some of the time – access the proper departmental subnet and use the web proxy to see the real internet (http/ftp only) and use webmail. The webmail interface is refusing to actually send any mail, but at least I can read the latest arguments on d-d-l.
To make matters worse I broke gnome-games in CVS on Monday and didn’t notice. Richard has fixed this for me (I can still make Bugzilla comments)
As a final desperate move I decided to do some of the telephone wiring at home myself. Whoever had installed the original system had done a very bad job of it, I’m still not entirely sure what they were trying to achieve. In any event only one out of three jack points worked and the construction work took out the one that worked. So last night I went into the roof, found the end of the cable that had been cut off when the wall was removed and attached an extension cable to it. The cable now runs out of the man-hole in the roof, down into the hall and through to the living room where it meets the ADSL modem and a phone. I now have internet access again. There is also an answering machine for the benefit of the parental units.