Newsletter #40

Each December I promise myself that no matter what, THIS year, I'm not leaving the house on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve. Of course, this year, just like last, all my vows came to naught.

In a rare stroke of foresight, I realized early Saturday morning that if I didn't zip off to the bank and pay some bills RIGHT NOW, I wouldn't be able to pay until Tuesday morning when I would technically be late. So, into the shower, get dressed, all the while Nora is making a shopping list, since I have to go into town anyway. Then I thought it might be a good idea to make sure the bank was open, so Nora called and sure enough they were closed. Oh well, I had the shopping list so I went to town anyway.

I arrived at Riba Smith in Punta Pacifica and immediately left when I saw the length of the checkout lines. There wasn't really anything essential on the list, and I could get the prepaid phone card I needed at Cable & Wireless. Of course, they were sold out, but helpfully told me that I could get cards at Riba Smith. Yeah, right.

At least I was able to buy a dozen self-tapping metal screws in Do-It Center to attach the new 'Paradise Services' license plates to the front of our cars.

I went back home and did a few chores, and still needing beer and prepaid phone cards, I decided to make a trip to Plaza Tocumen. Fortunately, I spotted the enormous traffic jam before I actually got tied up in it, and by taking a different street and coming in from the opposite direction, I drove straight to a parking spot. The 99 store was SRO, but I managed to buy the garlic I came for. I bought the phone cards from another small store and picked up the beer at the Chino's on the way back home. The traffic jam had only got worse.

We're getting too old to enjoy staying up all night partying, so we went to bed early, only to be wakened at about 11:00 PM when the early fireworks started. This New Year's was the noisiest I've ever experienced. There were a lot more fireworks and a lot louder explosions, and we couldn't even hear the TV for an hour. Not even the invasion was that loud.

Today (Sunday), two friends and fellow Texans, John Mercier and Marje Gerhart came over to help us eat the traditional blackeyed peas and cornbread, and welcome the New Year in a more serene manner. Marje is the owner of that beautiful lakefront place in Arenosa that is shown in the FSBO section on the website.

The C&W technician finally showed up on Monday last week and since I was home sick with a nasty stomach bug, I was unable to be there when he "fixed" the problem. Feeling a bit better the next day, I went into the office and discovered that port 21 was open, 22 was not, 23 was, and 80, which should have allowed access to the computer's web server, connected to the router's HTML setup page. Naturally, we called C&W, explaining yet again what the problem was and why we needed those ports open. So, we called them again, and the technician was told, yet again, that I could not wait patiently in the office until he decided to show up, and was given my cell number and instructions to contact me the day before he planned to go to the office, so we could both get there at the same time. About 9:00 the following day, I got a call, and he asked me again what was the problem. He insisted that the ports needed were open and had been. I checked, and sure enough, port 22 which had been closed the day before was open, port 23 was closed and port 80 now connected with the web server. Just as I verified this, the office manager called and told me the technician was there. So much for the promised coordination. I told the office manager to tell thanks and not to let him touch anything.

So what happened? Well, the routers are accessible from the WAN on port 23, so despite C&W's insistence that they could not fix the problem from their offices, I'm convinced someone at tech support telnetted into the router and corrected the misconfiguration the previous evening. The whole operation only took a month. Quite amazing, considering I set up my broadband router at home in about 5 minutes, and it is very similar to the router at the office.

Not much change this week, but we did finish out the year with a new record for visitors, which are now running a daily average of over 60. We're expecting over 2000 in January and 5000 per month around June or July. We don't want to grow too fast.