"No wonder people get in a permanent start of denial about the need for building maintenance. It is all about negatives, never about rewards. Doing it is a pain. Not doing it can be catastrophic. A constant draining expense, it never makes money. You could say it does save money in the long run, but even that is a negative because you never see the saving in any accountable way. (If Beerbohm's warehouse roof had been fixed, he would not have noticed.P When, after months or years of nagging, you finally do the work -- refinish the floor, hire the roofers, replace the damned furnace -- you have nothing new and positive, just a negated negative. The problem that needed fixing turned into an even worse problem during the chaos of repair, and then it went away. Even the Bible is on your case for waiting so long: 'By much slouthfulness the building decayeth.' (Ecclesiastes, X, 18.)"
---Stuart Brand, How Buildings Learn

Maintenance would seem to be the theme du jour. Sam, by not maintaining a good relationship with the foster-care provider, was punished by not getting to go with me today. (Actually, I found it a bit of a relief. I really just wanted to stay home.)

At home, I started working on changing ISPs. Netcom/Mindspring stopped giving me a discount for paying automagically, and is up to $21.95 a month, for a shell account, no Web connection (except for a jury-rigged Trumpet Winsock, 16 bits, that only allows a Netscape 3.x) and nobody else (i.e., Rich) could use it. JPS is offering $11.50 a month if you pay for a year, two different e-mail accounts and we could both be on at once if we had different phone lines, and I can use a 32-bit winsock with Netscape 4.7. (I only have 4.2 at the moment, but that's fixable.) You do the math. The advantage to Netcom at the time was that I could call in from San Jose or Spokane or Seattle. (Or, last year, Pittsburgh.) JPS will work at least for mail, anywhere too, so it really seems like a good deal.

Rich thought what I needed was the Windows Dial-up/Network program. I found the system disk and installed it. Then I tried it with a couple of things and it didn't work, but worse than that, then my Trumpet Winsock didn't work, and I couldn't get onto the Web! (Not that it (twitch) bothers (shiver) me at all(fidget)). (Bill Gates is the Antichrist. That's probably the only thing Janet Reno and I have agreed on during this administration.) So I uninstalled it, and Rich found where the winsock driver, the wrong one, was lurking. I got my Web fix (187 hours online in October!) and then installed... and uninstalled... the D-U/N program again. Hmm.

OK, I bet I can finally use that 32-bit Winsock I got some time ago. I forgot I was holding onto it, so I went to Tucows, spent some time looking at a free Microsoft one, a 5-cow program, before remembering that Bill Gates is the Antichrist and going for this Trumpet v. 5. (It was only a 4-cow program!) It'll cost me $30 but it's going to be worth it. I configured as far as I could, even reading the help files. (shock!) Then I called the JPS tech support. (Rich said "where'd you find the number?" In the "local numbers", actually.) Once we got through username and address, I told the very nice young man that I had a dumb question, but not as dumb as wanting to know what to do with the "cup holder." He laughed. Then when I asked for the DNS IP addresses, he told me their Windoze configurations would have this. Then I explained that I was putting on a Trumpet Winsock, and wanted to use (shhh!) Netscape, and I think I got a little respect as well, and he gave me the numbers. I typed them in and voila! The Communicator works. Then it was trying to figure out the configuration on mail. I can get it in, now, but will have to wait 48 hours or so till I get my JPS mail account to mail out with.

I'm still trying to figure out how the newsgroups get "cleaned out", but I'm delighted. And the best thing is, now my SETI@Home is working! I'm apparently analyzing (almost 1% so far) a data packet from Arecibo on March 28 of this year. Lotsa pretty colors! Also, I checked out the National Geographic map site, and now it works. I am gonna be spending many happy hours there! So I'm fairly chuffed. I'm going to have to do some serious maintenance on my bookmarks now.