What's the first thing you do after waking up in the morning? Besides the obligatory trip to the head, and being just in time to see my wife off to work, the first thing I did this morning was check the path from my computer to Benway. It felt like I was watching this horrible recurring nightmare. As the tracert began to log each hop, I saw what had by now become a predictable list of routers along the way. As I cursed the internet gods for only giving me one path through cyberspace, I watched as my screen predictably slowed down at hop 9, the last known hop before disappearing into the black hole of nothingness. Then it happened... hop 10 magically appeared, then hop 11, and things just went smoothly from there, all the way to Benway's house!

So folks, the glass wall has been dismantled. And I won't have to deal with mIRC again until the next crisis. If that makes me a lamer (prefering the Java version of a chat to the "real" mIRC experience), I plead guilty. For the record, I actually got mIRC reconfigured and working last night, bleary-eyed as I was. But it took an effort that I don't believe should have been necessary... I had to add my own mIRC server entry to the default list. What if I hadn't been observant while the Java chat connected to its server. I would have never known what to use as the server name. I was lucky, and I know it. Sometime over the next few days, I will add ALL the servers from the Java chat into the mIRC database, so I won't find myself stranded again.

Until then, it's happy sailing to my favourite chat site.

Good morning!