As promised, the new wifi modem arrived today. Dead modems must be a common occurrence as the installation info was specifically written for a replacement modem and not a new installation. The process wasn't as smooth as the original setup and took a lot longer. The initialization was supposed to take about 10-15 minutes but after twenty minutes there was still a dreaded red light and I was starting to think the problem was due to the rat's nest of wiring in the buildings basement and an AT&T guy would have to come out and solve the problem. But patience paid off and at the thirty minute mark all indicators were green and the system was back up.
There are only two wired connections to the modem: the power supply and the line that plugs into the wall connection for the naked DSL. Nothing else, but I could plug in a few ethernet cables if I needed them and two phone lines if I wanted to pony up for some land lines. I don't know why Uncle Ken has an octopus of wires.
The security issue at Starbucks is that your device is on a shared network and I think there are programs that can snoop and see what else is connected on the network. I don't follow current security protocols and maybe I'd be okay with the built-in security on my laptop but I'd rather not take the chance. I have no passwords, banking information, or other sensitive material on the laptop, but some bad actor might be able to plant some little program (spyware/malware/ransomware) to screw things up and make my life needlessly messy.
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Time is a constantly flowing river, is it not? The objective reality of the tree we observed last summer has changed. It's the same tree, but it also not the same tree; where there were once leafy shades of green are now barren branches. The impact of time on objective reality raises some more questions which I won't follow at this, uh, time.
Before my connection died, I stumbled on a short YouTube video that talked about the origins of the 24 hour day. We can credit the ancient Egyptians for this one, which they based on twelve stars for the period of night and extrapolated another twelve stars for an equal period of day; perhaps I'm misremembering. Anyhow, the business of sixty minutes to the hour and sixty seconds to the minute came from a Greek guy, using the base 60 numerical notation used by the Sumerians and later the Babylonians.
Base 60 is screwy, but makes a certain kind of sense. You can count up to twelve using one hand if you count the finger bones but not the fingers themselves; the thumb does the counting and sixty is evenly divisible by twelve. Sixty was chosen because it is divisible by so many smaller numbers, which must have been a big deal to those ancient folk. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30 are all factors of 60. That's why we have 360 degrees in a circle, or so I've read. I still haven't figured out how to divide a circle into 360 degrees using only a compass and straight edge; I should try again.
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"No Mr Bond, I expect you to have your mind fragmented."
Huh? Another example of Uncle Ken testing the limits of his literary license, I suppose. No matter.
I don't understand his beef with the "year in review" bits that are popular this time of year. The crapola he refers to is from websites, newspapers, etc, that he's already familiar with and if he would break his routine and check out the yearly review from other sources he may be surprised. There will be much overlap but also some nuggets of info that he may not be aware of that happened this past year. There's a lot that happened that received little press but if you hate following links you'll never know what you didn't know.
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