I headed out into the sunny but cold world and found a cache I’ve had my eye on since Christmas.  The Christmas Present Cache (GCZW7T) was originally set up just before Christmas as a sort of Christmas present exchange cache.  It’s since been replaced with a more traditional cache container, though an assortment of Christmas ribbons and ornaments still adorn trees in the immediate vicinity.  While I was following the trails in to the cache, I bumped into a couple of friends who were out cross-country skiing.  They decided to accompany me to see what I was up to.

I also took the opportunity to release a Unite for Diabetes travelbug (TB1B65G), which is one of twenty thousand.  Each of these travelbugs has a specific destination it’s trying to get to.  Mine is trying to get to Tigri, India.

For most of the last 24 hours, I have been without network access at home. Calls to my ISP go into their phone queue system, which tells me that it there is a network problem their technicians are “diligently working to repair” before telling me that it can’t connect me right now because all their reps are with other clients and then hanging up.

It appears that the block of network addresses that my IP address belongs to is no longer being announced to the world, meaning that I can fling packets into the ether and though they might get to the destination, the destination system doesn’t know how to connect back to my address.

This means that I’ve had to make alternative arrangements to transfer my voice over IP (VoIP) phone stuff to a server that’s not on my ISP’s network, so if you’ve called and left me a message, I’ll get back to you next time I check my voicemail.

Update: As of Sunday morning at about 02:43:47, my Internet connection is working. 02:43:47 is the first log entry in Pinetree’s sendmail logs and it happens to be a piece of spam. (Anyone surprised it was spam?)

I just want to take a moment to wish everyone a safe, prosperous and happy 2007!

Like most years, 2006 had its ups and downs. The “ups” include starting a new job at Statistics Canada, spending more time at the cottage in the summer than I have in several years, doing more geocaching and getting back into amateur radio. The “downs” include becoming single again and still not doing enough diving (a complaint from my 2005 summary).

Still, overall 2006 was a very good year and I’m looking forward to 2007!