One of the first things I do every morning is pop open the laptop, check e-mail and catch up on news and anything I may have missed in the six or so hours I was asleep. I'm not as rigid as to have a set order of sites or time allotted to each, but the routine is fairly... routine. That's why when I woke up this morning and opened the laptop, only to learn there was no Web access, that was a little over the threshold for annoying.
Was it the Airport base station? Was it the cable modem? Was it the Comcast service itself causing the issue? Too many choices! Of course, I reset the base station. Nothing. I unplugged the cable from the base station and connected directly to the laptop. Nothing. I reset the cable modem. Nothing. I unplugged each and let sit for a while, and then plugged back in. Nothing. Grrr...
So I set back to my original spot and connected the laptop to power. I tried to ping Yahoo!. Nothing. A bit later I tried to ping Google... and after some delay it came through... slowly. But then it was as if everything else fired to life. Mail reported I had messages. WeatherPop kindly informed me it was 36 in Boston, where I'll be headed later. No good reason for the Internet being down, and no good reason for it coming back up. I hate that.
