Behind the Camera: This Will be a Chilly Week

Our furnace quit, night before last.

There's a remote chance that a replacement part will come tomorrow: but it's more likely that it'll arrive Friday. Or maybe next week. As I posted in another blog last night, "I'm Sick, the Furnace is Kaput, There's a Storm Coming: but Other Than That, Things are Fine!." (Through One Dad's Eye (December 29, 2008))

This shouldn't affect the webcam: we've gone the night without popping a circuit breaker, so it looks like my wife's planning with the electric heaters was efficient as ever.

Technical Difficulties and Having a Life

As you may still see, something happened right after 2:37 this morning, and there were no more updates for the picture.

I've started a quick fix - I hope - but don't know if it will work.

And, since I'm already four minutes behind schedule, getting #2 daughter and her finace to the airport, I can't stick around.

This Winter's First Storm

I've heard that parts of Minnesota got something like eight inches of snow this weekend, but around here it was more like three to five inches.

This morning Interstate 94 was shut down between Jamestown, North Dakota, and Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Later, I understand, the stretch from Fergus to Alexandria was closed, too.

Here in Sauk Centre, it's anyone's guess what the school will decide to do.

White Christmas, Here We Come!

Snow over the last few days gave this part of Minnesota a traditional, seasonal, look.

It also made driving treacherous in spots, but that's par for the course around here.

I've found myself singing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" off and on. You can see why.

Serious Gap in Service Tuesday Night

Actually, it was mostly Wednesday morning.

If you checked out the Small Town America: Central Minnesota webcam Tuesday evening, or really early Wednesday morning, you might have noticed something wrong with the picture.

Here's what happened:

The webcam sends its signal through the same service that provides our telephone and cable television: economical, and most of the time highly satisfactory.

Earlier this week, not so much.

Here's the sequence of events, as I've pieced it together. All times are approximate:

• Tuesday, December 2, 2008
  • 6 p.m.
    Internet service lost
  • 7 p.m.
    Internet service restored
  • Midnight
    Internet service lost
    Telephone service lost
    Cable service lost
• Wednesday, December 3, 2008
  • 5:50 a.m.
    Internet service still out
    Telephone service restored
    Cable service still out
  • Between 5:50 a.m. and 9 a.m.
    Internet service restored
  • Between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.
    Cable service restored

I'm not sure about when we got cable back, but one of my daughters tells me that the cable box display blinked and flickered somewhere between 8 and 9 in the morning, so that's probably when it happened.

I was working on something when we lost connection to the Internet - which is another story.

The point here is that, while we were cut off from the rest of the world, this webcam was, too.

Sorry about that, but things seem to be working now. In fact, the connection is working more efficiently than it has for several days.

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About the times I listed up there:

I live pretty close to the middle of North America, in Minnesota. All times are Central time, USA style.

Minnesota time is UTC/GMT -6 hours, which means that our clocks are six hours behind Coordinated Universal Time. That's not taking Daylight Saving Time into account.

This year, Daylight Saving Time started March 9, 2008 at 2:00 AM local standard time and ended November 2, 2008 at 2:00 AM local daylight time. What the Capitol Hill bunch will decide we have to do next year, I don't know.