I had a good day today.  Got a lot done.  Enjoyed being with my kids.  In fact only one bad thing happened today, but it was bad; MY DSL WENT DOWN!  Gasp!!  How can anyone survive life without broadband, especially in December, and especially when hosting ten websites?

So I called Verizon, and predictably they didn't find anything wrong, and have "opened a trouble ticket".  I asked for a prognosis and they said these kinds of problems are usually resolved within 24-48 hours.  What!  You want me to be down for two days!!  Okay, stay calm.  I made a dial-up connection from my laptop to pacbell.net, my trusty ISP going back for about ten years, and poked around a bit.  I found a diagnostic program on the Westell website for my DSL modem.  This program cannot even find the DSL modem, let alone diagnose it.  I'm guessing the modem has died.  It will take Verizon days to agree and more days to ship me a new modem.  So I'm down.  I can dial-up from my laptop, but my network is down.  Sigh.

But wait!  I have an Airport Extreme wireless access point - and it has a built in V.90 dial backup facility!  To make a not-so-very-long story short, I was able to configure the access point to act as a dial-up gateway to my pacbell.net account, so here I am, with my entire network running on a V.90 dial-up at 56K.  Yeah, my websites are slow, and yeah, surfing is a bit slow, but email and RSS are working just fine, and everything is up.  If you are reading this, you are reading it over a dial-up connection.

I knew Apple's wireless hubs were cool, but this is really cool.  And it isn't even a feature I would have ever looked for or cared about until now.  Excellent.

P.S. I have modified my page template to eliminate all unnecessary images.  Not too bad, eh?  Who knows, I might leave it this way.  What do you think?