We're back...

4.00 am Power restored. Let's hope it stays on this time.

St Louis Bread Company - Free WiFi

St Louisans are taking advantage of the free WiFi access offered by St Louis Bread Company.

(Were you here? Feel free to comment and say hi!)

More storm pics

I took these yesterday evening, just haven't had a chance to post them yet.

First some more pics from on our street.

At the end of our street, on the street that forms a T with our street, is a house with a tree that appears to have been struck by lightning.



And power is still out at home.

Highlights of the day so far

4.03 am Power comes back on after 33 hours

8.45 am Offered a job

10.48 am Another storm comes through

10.57 am Power goes off again.

Yay! Yay! and Boo!

Could be a while...

STL Today reports:

St. Louis utility Ameren called last night's storm the worst in the company's history as more than 491,421 of its customers across Missouri and Illinois remained without power as of 4:32 p.m.

At a press conference this morning Ameren officials it may take three to five days for some customers to get their power back.

"We don't want to give people the impression that their power will be back on in a few hours," Said Richard Mark AmerenUE Senior Vice President of Energy Delivery. "We don't want people to take this lightly. It is going to take three to five days to get some people back on."

Great.

The Storm of '06

I'm sure that's what it will become known as.

Last night we had a storm. A rather large storm, and unexpected. Apparently part of a storm in Chicago suddenly split off, and headed down the Mississippi River, and the heat and humidity caused it to gain strength as it came. 80 mile-an-hour winds caused lots of damage, and part of the roof of one of the airport buildings tore off and landed on I-70, just in time for it to be blocking our way home last night.

KWMU reports that Ameren UE had 450,000 customers out, their largest outage in the 100+ year history of the company. We got home to find cones blocking off the road right outside our house, so we parked up, and walked there, wondering what was up. Two trees of a neighbour had falled across the road, narrowly missing our next-door neighbour's vehicle, and pulling down an electricity cable as it did so.

Here are some pictures from just by our house, this morning.




As of right now, we appear to be still be without power (I called home and the answering machine isn't picking up), so goodness knows what the freezer will be like. Oh. And today is the hottest day of the year so far. 101° F / 38° C (with a heat index of 115° F / 46° C). Marvellous.

So I'm camping out, keeping cool, in a local cafe that has power, aircon, and WiFi.

I'm sure I'll update and post more pics later.

PPPoE for DSL - not where I want it.

I've been playing.

When I moved to the USA, I brought a number of computers with me. For various reasons, I never got around to turning them on. A little while back, I decided to power one of them up and install FreeBSD. That all went fine, and since then I've been playing. Not just for the sake of playing, but to flex my unix-fu muscles too.

Yesterday, I decided I wanted to reconfigure my home network, and put the FreeBSD box between the DSL modem and the wireless router, so I can have it as a firewall that I have a bit more control over than the limited abilities that the WiFi router gives me.

So, the DSL Modem is working in bridge mode - the WiFi router is negotiating the PPPoE connection. I remembered I'd made a config change on the DSL Modem to do that, and knew to get it to do PPPoE on the Modem again, I needed to do a reset-to-factory-defaults. So, I made sure I should be able to recover and reset it. But it didn't work, it stayed in bridge mode. After some thought, I realised that the modem I had was not the model I thought it was, but an older model. It only does bridged mode. The modem I'd reconfigured had been one at a previous employer.

Now, I could get the FreeBSD box to negotiate the PPPoE, but it's non trivial, and makes minor modifications to the network at a later date more complex. If I have a DSL modem negotiating PPPoE over the DSL line and offering DHCP leases to the ethernet connection, it means that I can move things around and they should Just Work^TM.

So, I call the tech support of my DSL service, who gave me the modem in the first place. Kudos must go to them for not handing me over to India with people hard to understand, and following a script, without really understanding it. Kudos also to them for having female techies. Anyway, I explained that my current modem only works in bridge mode, and that I'd like one that does PPPoE on the modem. She understood, and said that the current model they use does exactly that.

However, that technically was a customer support issue, so I was put through to the CSR, and she told me that it would be $50 + S&H to get a replacement modem! I said I'd been a loyal customer for 5.5 years, of which 3 to 4 years has been a DSL customer. She said she was unable to help, but that I could get a call from a manager. So the manager should be calling me tomorrow.

Really, I've been a customer for a long time, and I have to pay, yet new customers get the equipment that does what I want, free. Maybe, when I talk to the manager, I should mention that I'm considering getting cable TV, and although I've been happy with the DSL service I have at the moment, perhaps I should consider seeing what Internet offerings my cable provider can give me...

On the other hand, if you're in the St Louis area, and you have a DSL Modem that's capable of doing PPPoE, but you use it in Bridged mode, and want to do a swap, let me know...