RSS 
Kind of a lame day. We got our house's gas meter changed while I was out which meant a whole house power down. Thankfully I was called and told and I logged on to and powered down my desktop. The procedure was quick and so my UPS took care of my server and firewall. But after that, connections to my server were incredibly slow. I couldn't figure it out. I started installing some bandwidth monitors to see if something was hogging everything and ran into another problem. Good bandwidth monitors aren't easy to just throw up. Anyways, when I got home I fell back on good old gkrellm which, since version 2, can do remote monitoring. I determined that nothing was hogging my bandwidth. Just now it came to me and I rebooted my modem and everything is fine. Weird and lame but at least resolved.
More lame is that when I turned on my laptop this after noon I noticed it has developed a 1-2 inch column on the left-ish part of the screen (not side, left middle) that is a little darker than the rest of the screen. Thankfully it's not terrible (yet?) and is only noticeably in some circumstances but it sucks huge that it's there at all and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. It has been suggested I take it into the people who sold it to me and ask what repairs might run me (over a year old). Anyone else have any ideas?
