Well, the chaos continues. It seems that Bell has pulled the line cards for most/all of iStop.com’s customers. Even though the company iStop is basically selling everything to is issuing install orders for the line cards, it will probably be four business days until I have my DSL connectivity restored.

Between now and then, I’m going to have to make arrangements for email to backup on another server for some of my domains. And I’m going to have to work something out for my VoIP stuff, too.

This is almost enough to make me get highspeed Internet access on cable — at least for the short term — something I swore I’d never do.

Well, it looks like there’s a little ISP chaos going on right now. My current provider is throwing in the towel after having a de facto loss in a war of wills with Bell et al. Thus, my network at home is currently off the ‘net.

News peers: I will have connectivity restored in a couple of hours.
People getting their email from me: Your inbound email should be in a holding pattern on my secondary MX and the server should be available in a couple of hours.

Yesterday was the dragonboat races for my team, Paddle By Numbers. Our first race was under ideal conditions and we did the 500m in 2:32.71. The conditions were less favourable for the second race and we did 2:33.17. With our best time, we placed 122 out of 170. Not as well as we’d have liked, but still not bad all things considered.

There were new boats this year made out of fibreglass rather than wood. They were a lot faster, but also a lot less stable. One tipped at a practice Thursday evening and another tipped during a race. There was also a boat that lost its steersperson during the race. In the five years I’ve been doing this, I can’t recall a boat tipping nor a steersperson going overboard. (I’m sure the latter has happened, but I’m not aware of it.) This is probably a result of the new boats, so maybe they’ll modify the design next year and build up the keel a bit to make them a little more stable.

The weather held out until our second race. About 15 minutes after we finished, the skies opened up with a torrential downpour and everyone was soaked to the bone. But the weather cleared up after half an hour and I assume they continued racing. 🙂

Once again, I’m steering the boat for Paddle By Numbers, one of the Statistics Canada teams in the Ottawa Dragonboat Festival. This year, the festival is raising money for the Ottawa Food Bank, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada, the Ontario Rett Syndrome Association and the Rideau Valley Conservation Foundation. If you’d like to sponsor me, please click here. If you scroll about halfway down the page, you’ll find a “donate” button.

If you’d like to come out and cheer, our first race is scheduled to start at 0830 Saturday morning. 🙂

Over the last couple of days, the amount of spam has increased significantly. I have had to weed out about 50 comments that made it in and moderate at least a hundred that didn’t.

What I don’t understand is why the spammers think they have the right to advertise their crap in my blog.

I checked my geocaching.com account and found that the cache Kathy and I placed yesterday has been approved by TPTB.

So, GCP93C is now available for your geocaching enjoyment! 🙂

I had a nice day, Saturday. I picked up Kathy shortly after lunch and we met up with my friend, Patti, for ice cream (“there’s always room for ice cream“) and then Kathy and I headed out to find somewhere to have a picnic. We ended up at the Baxter Conservation Area which is operated by the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority. There, had our picnic and watched the Ice Cream Float — a pontoon boat operated by an enterprising fellow who said to himself one day “Eureka! If I put some coolers on my boat, I can sell ice cream to the people at the beach!” — as it dispensed ice cream and other goodies to the people at the beach.

After a few hours at the beach, we headed off to find somewhere to hide a new geocache. We ended up choosing a location somewhere southwest of North Gower. As soon as it’s approved, I’ll write something here.