Yes, I believe tonight is Tobias's first adventure in a real snowstorm. Fortunately for both, Tobias's operator has had ample past experience is such conditions. :)

Slippin and sliding around the corners, kickin up clouds of white when the stoplights turn green, and having a jolly good time plowing throw the blowing freeze of dense whiteness.

Or... well, okay, maybe not. It actually took over twice as long to go direct from office to house. Almost three times as long. Traffic piled up like a bunch of crazies behind the freeway ramps. Either people didn't know, or they managed to conveniently forget which lanes were designated for turning. I nearly had one idiot plow into me. Apparently (s)he thought there was a double right turn lane at the intersection between Interlocken and Interlocken. Bzzzzzt. And then there were those idiots who I conveneniently passed while they were trying to form double left turn lanes onto westbound 36, where there is only one lane, and ONE onramp. BZZZZZT. That other lane was SUPPOSED to be for us STRAIGHT people. Or.... okay, that didn't come out like it was supposed to. Nothing against homosexuals here. I swear!

Once past the freeway craze, it was fairly easy going. Mucho road slippage, but that's a minor problem when compared with other drivers who just don't have a clue how to drive in snow and ice. Here's a hint: DON'T tailgate.

The best thing to do when one gets to the open road, and there no cars in front, none behind, and no other objects around: Hit the gas, and watch the speedometer race up the scale while the actual distance travelled remains the same. Then slam the brakes, and feel the car keep moving. Truly, this is a good excersise. It's not just some macho silliness. It gives one a much better sense of (a) the current road conditions, and how to deal with them, and (b) the intricacies of the vehicle's handling. Very useful to know when a real crisis occurs, and only quick thinking can avoid an accident. There is a practicality to my madness. Really. :)

Got home, and found myself unable to access any net hosts. Checked the DSL. Not down. Whew!

Tried the usual steps of diagnosis, and concluded that the gateway was either down or disconnected somewhere between here and there. Called RMI support.

The guy asked what carrier I use.

Covad.

"Ah." He proceeded to explain that Covad's entire link to RMI suffering problems right now, and they will likely be resolved within a half hour.

[Bitscape attempts a ping.]

Hmmmm... Still down. Well, my real hope in this case is that there is no US Pest in the picture. Whenever that evil company spawned from the pit of hell is not involved, things tend to get done with much greater efficiency. I trust that is the case here.

What is not yet known is whether there will be Debian updates to my perl dbi and pg libs. Last night, I was unable to submit my rambling because I had just done a Debian upgrade. To my horror, instead of my words being inserted into the neat little postgres box, a batch of errors were spewed out to the console, and I was nearly afraid I had lost the whole thing. (Thank goodness I put at least a little bit of error checking into the script, so it only deletes the temporary text file after a SUCCESSFUL insertion into the db. Otherwise, my somewhat frayed NIN commentary would have been SOL.)

If there's not a working Debian update to be found when my connection returns, I might have to consider more drastic measures, such as (shudder) installing the perl modules by hand. Oh horror of horrors. Then when there ARE working modules that get updated, we get another clobber mess. Or not. Actually, if I stick everything under /usr/local/lib, I can just delete it later when Debian stuff gets fixed. Or maybe I ought to do the Right Thing, file a bug report on Debain, and spend the weekend figuring it out and hacking up a fix.

(Problem with above idea: Past experience has shown that usually by the time I've barely even started to figure out what's really going on in the code, somebody else has already fixed it, posted the new version, and moved on with life.)

Oh well. We'll see what happens. I think I'll go see about food.