Broadband Cut Off, Web Server Frozen and it’s Monday – I’ve had a Bad Day

When things go wrong, it usually happens in threes. Well, if you consider Monday being the busiest day of the week and things go bad even once, that can be considered a bad day. Regardless, I rarely have bad days and today just happened to be one of them. I practically live on the Internet and my broadband service was cut off long enough to be annoying. After it was restored, I found my web server had completely locked up. These two events are not even remotely related to each other; that they happened at nearly the same time was coincidental. The worst part is that I still have eight hours (and some change) left of the day. What else can go wrong?

My DSL Broadband Service

My DSL connection was migrated and upgraded just a few days ago. Never mind the fact that it caused me to be without any kind of Internet service until I called the old provider. Well, apparently they’ve started migrating as many connections as they can before Christmas Day. That’s the reason I was without broadband service this morning – I didn’t even have a dial tone for about an hour.

So… they waited three months from the time I was told I’d be upgraded before they did it and now they want to do everyone else at the same time. What did I do to deserve this?

My Web Server

I have a developer server hosted by Media Temple. What that means is that I have to do everything on the server, including making sure the web server (and any other server software) continues to run as best it can. When my DSL connection became live again, I found I couldn’t connect to the web server no matter what direction I tried (web browser, SSH, FTP, etc.). Luckily, I have the admin panel at Media Temple bookmarked and LastPass automatically logs me in. I had to log in and have them reboot the container for the VPS since I had no way to do it from within the container.

Rebooting the server that way takes up to 30 minutes. I have no way of knowing how long it was frozen – it could have been 30 minutes or it could have been an hour and 30 minutes. I shouldn’t complain. The server has been up continuously for 90 days without as much as a hiccup.

Bad Day

You want to know what’s sad? Just before I started to write this, the Chipmunks version of “Bad Day” started looping in my head. Why couldn’t it have been the version by Daniel Powter?

What do you do when you’ve had a bad day? More specifically, when you’ve had a bad day as far as the Internet is concerned? Well, you can pout or you can complain to anyone who’ll listen (or both) or…

Once everything was back to normal, at least normal for me, I left the house and decided to commune with the real world. I drove to the bank (or rather, I let a relative drive for me while I rode as a passenger), converted my US dollars to Philippine pesos at the place where I normally do my foreign currency exchange, returned and spent a couple of hours harassing anyone who would let me (mostly nieces and nephews).

Sure I have a ton of work to do, mostly dealing with PHP and CSS coding, but that couple of hours away was enough to reduce my personal stress level to near zero. Who would have thought the real world could be so much fun?