About an hour (more or less) ago, I noticed that it was taking an unusually long time to bring up my home page in Firefox. My home page is really simple, it's the Google search page. Very, very small. So… I turned off the DSL modem for a few minutes, rebooted the computer, defragged (using Diskeeper) the hard drive, etc. Still slow.

Then I finally got a decent connection and brought up Google News. Lo and behold, there had been an underwater earthquake below the southern tip of Taiwan, disrupting telephone and Internet communications in the Asian countries. The news article lists it as happening Tuesday (American news), but it was Wednesday in this part of the world — today.

Whew! And I thought I was gonna have to call Subictel and cuss someone.