[plug] Missing opera (using chamber music instead)

[Leon Brooks]

Jonathon Bates wrote:
> As for the original poster (Skribe) we had a few problems with a couple
> of the routers today, that could have been the problem. Granted im not
> 100% sure as I havnt been into work and the emails I have received havnt
> been ovrely comprehensive. But the problem *should* be resolved now!

Hi Jonathon. Glad to see you in there righting wrongs! About half of my
on-line-full-time customers dial on through iiNet. I have some amusing
iiNet history for you (-: I hope your sense of humour is in the "on"
position, otherwise come back and read on at a better time :-)

About two years ago, a friend of mine who was dialled in through iiNet
suddenly lost web service. Being a computer scientist at heart, he
walked the binary tree and within five minutes deduced that iiNet had
lost their name service. All of it.

He rang iiNet tech support. They told him to hang up and dial again (-:
repeat the mantra: "ctrl-alt-del is my god, ctrl-alt-del fixes all" :-).
He insisted that this wouldn't fix it and carefully explained what the
problem was and how he had isolated it. Tech support wouldn't give in.
Tech support didn't like him dialling iiNet from a Pyramid minicomputer.
Friend did give in.

It took *two*hours* for iiNet tech support to discover by themselves
that their name service was down, all of it, and get it fixed enough for
friend (and everyone else) to dial on again.

Some more recent iiNet history:

Two months ago, a small ISP that I occasionally do tech support for had
a potential customer ring in. Their first question was "Are you owned by
iiNet?" No. "Are iiNet going to buy you?" No. "Are you sure?" Yes.
"Promise me that iiNet won't buy you out." OK, I promise (not much risk
of it, in reality). "Great. How do I sign up?" Bear in mind when reading
on that this ISP has a whole 15 analogue dialin lines, and a 64K ISDN
uplink... as I recall, Networx had about 300 analogues and 120 digital
lines at the time, plus other arrangements.

It turns out that ms. customer had fist joined iiNet just before an
important founder left. Service, she found, was starting to suck. She
switched to Wantree. Imagine her delight when iiNet bought Wantree (who
here noticed that iiNet's pages said "we are buying" and Wantree's said
"we are merging"?). She switched to Networx, a fine ISP managed at the
time by none other than our illustrious President, Matt Kemner, now Core
Guru and Smoke Containment Controller at WASP. Guess who now owns
Networx? She didn't wait.

Actually, it's a bit of a vowel wars at the moment. A heck of a lot of
ISPs are owned by either iinet or uunet. I think aanet and oonet were
bypassed because they could be mistaken for porn sites. (-:

Random piece of Internet trivia triggered by free-associating on the
word "aanet": the large mirror site mirror.aarnet.edu.au has a
robots.txt file (control instructions for web-bots) with the contents:

    warning! warning! danger will robinson! warning! warning!

> "No pain is worse than that of giving in."

"No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back"
    -- Turkish Proverb

"Drive A: not found, formatting default drive C: instead"
    -- Message printed by a (harmless) Windows virus

-- 
Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?