I know it’s been awhile - chalk it up mainly to the internet going down for three or four days.
Before getting to my normal ramblings (non detail oriented feel free to skip this paragraph) our daily routine consists of three home administered saline drip sessions, scheduled and emergency ostomy appliance changes, taking 25 pills a day and keeping myself amused reading, watching t.v., napping, playing guitar, pontificating on Facebook and keeping up this blog. As my nephew would say, now you know.
I want to write a bit about our latest AT&T tech guy and my optimism for our latest repair job. We’ve had DSL in this house for 13 years and it’s always been slow and funky. What the the first tech did was take one of our phone outputs and divide it into data and talk. Then we were given filter thingies to put on the other outlets. The way things went, the other phones could screw up our WiFi and, since so much was going on internally, problems couldn’t often be resolved without a visit to the house. This was true through 12 + years with 2Wire and the last six months with U-Verse.
Well this young man (early 20s probably) said, “to heck with this” and quickly ran a new wire from the outside of the house to a dedicated data outlet. The Data and talk divider is now outside the house. We now know, he swore, that any problem you have will have to be outside the house.
That makes sense to me, plus it’s definitely working faster. So kudos to the AT&T techo-nerd installer. And anyone with AT&T U-Verse or other DSL keep this in mind to suggest to your set up or trouble shooting guy.
I’ll close by talking about another movie I saw in the hospital. That would be be Lincoln, a terrific movie about striking while the fire is hot (among other things). Lincoln knew that the lame duck congress was his best and perhaps only bet to get through the 13th Amendment, and he did it. LBJ certainly understood the importance of timing. Even a slight delay can lead to no progress, witness the gun control issue.
Anyway, It’s a bravura performance by Daniel Day Lewis, with an excellent script. It was also nice to see one of Terry’s and my favorite actors, David Strathairn, get such a nice meaty role in a major picture.
A thought provoking part of the picture is the question of what cause, tactic, or end is worth spending lives on. Obviously, the troops killed in battle are “legitimate” casualties. But what about Lincoln’s situation vis a vis the 13th amendment. The movie makes it pretty clear that peace could have come about sooner, but the slavery question wouldn’t have been settled to Lincoln’s and others' satisfaction. The Emancipation Proclamation was on shaky legal ground. So, he let the fighting continue, even permitting a Southern peace delegation to slowly make its way to Washington, while he maneuvered to get the amendment proposed and passed.
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