So, this evening, I was unable to get to the forums hosted by my old friend Chris. I could reach other web sites, and indeed even ping his machine, but not browse to it.
I sent him an sms stating that they were down, and then I noticed that I could reach them from a non-Woosh connection, and I postulated that Woosh (my ISP) had a bung transproxy or transproxy routing to IHUG where his machine lives.
His girlfriend, Helen, NATURALLY offered a counter-proposal which was quite compelling.
The problem was, she said, obviously that the Feng Shui around my modem was TOTALLY wrong.
Interesting …. and SO OBVIOUS.
I would put it to the test!
Here’s the modem in it’s default state:
As you can see, it’s Feng Shui is obviously “all up out of wack, yo” as we Feng Shui masters like to say. I decided to tie a red ribbon around it, and put a mirror behind it. The red ribbon attacts … good .. stuff. And the mirror distracts the Dragon of Misery by showing it its own reflection.
Results were not positive. Not only was the site still unreachable, but signal strength of the RF feed was down, and bit-error rates were up.
I had clearly angered the gods.
I decided to stop fucking around with mystic claptrap, and let the problem be solved by The Invisible Hand of The Market.
I put some positive reinforcement on one side of the modem, in the shape of money and beer. On the other side, I put A Scary Monster from Where The Wild Things Are. I then informed the modem that if it worked hard, respected the rule of law and embraced capitalism, it would get a reward. Otherwise, monsters awaited it.
No dice. My Woosh modem is some kind of pinko commie – both godless AND uninterested in capitalism.
I do not know what to do at this time. I may have to report it to the Department of Homeland Security.
Does New Zealand even have one of those?
And how spooky is the name “Department of Homeland Security”?