The Internet? Is that thing still around?

October 11, 2006 D. H. McKee

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Finally got internet back after 2 weeks of downtime. That’s DSL for you. Unfortunately, it’s meant no surfing from home, no blogging, and no torrent downloads (sigh). This problem necessitated a call to my ISP, along with many hours of troubleshooting the connection. My favourite tech support question was this one (I’d called from my land line, so that they would know my phone number from their caller-ID, and would be able to dig up my account file from that): “Have you got a dial tone your phone line?” I told them I refused to answer the question on the grounds that if they thought about it for a minute, they already had the answer.
In the end, it turned out to be Bell Canada’s problem — they switched something somewhere, and that caused a failure on more than one customer’s DSL line. Here’s a hint for anyone who’s troubleshooting DSL in the future: Don’t unplug your modem, unless it’s for a short period of time (i.e. for testing other phone jacks around your place). Apparently the phone company can check for modem sync remotely, and can’t help you if your modem’s unplugged. No one told me this, until a full week had passed.

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About This Site

As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

Writers often treat the bio like it’s an interview or something. Maybe like they’re having a conversation with you, the reader. While it may work sometimes, the most common way to write a bio is to write in the 3rd person.

I’m like those writers, and I’m talking to you directly, unlike the common way to do a bio. You should see my About page. It makes sense to me, since this is a bit which describes my blog’s website. When I get famous enough that I don’t have time to talk to you, I’ll have an intern write everything in 3rd person. Until then, you get to talk to me.

Like blogs of old, this one is a personal document of the comings and goings of me. Articles I’ve written, links I’ve posted, videos I liked, etc. Here, a first-person perspective is the way to go, at least for now. So, this is my site. I’m D. H. McKee, a sometimes artist, sometimes writer. Mostly just a guy on the internet.