when the internet is down

I'm not usually one to apologize for lack of updates, but I feel that an explanation is in order for the last month. It seems that there is some ongoing issue with my local phone exchange at Springwood, which has been causing intermittent outages in my ADSL connection. At least this is if I believe my ISP, who swear that the problem is caused by the phone lines, not by them.

It's amazing how a thing like this can put a spanner in the works, particularly in my blogging. It's very frustrating to think of a post and not be able to write or post it. It's not the same to draft something offline and then post it later, because often for me, writing and reading and research all go together. If I can't check sources and make links while I'm writing, I don't feel that I'm really writing a blog post - at the most drafting a post offline is like preparation for writing a post.

At least for me, every idea for a post only has a certain window of time to be published, and when that time expires, it is usually time to move on, even if it seemed like a really good idea originally. Things change, and what was interesting a month ago may seem a little stale if it's posted tomorrow.

Anyway, because it's such an almighty pain for me when the internet is down at home and I have no idea when it will return, I have arranged for limited dialup internet access as a backup. It's slow but at least it's reliable.