This last Thursday stank.
Not only did our ultrasound not provide us with the gender of our baby, as previously noted, but the power went out at our house for about half an hour. Half an hour without power is not too big a deal, but the shock was too much for a few of our electronics.
We use Vonage for our phone service. I like Vonage a lot. It allows us to make calls anywhere in the U.S. for a flat monthly rate without a per-minute charge. This allows Timothy to call my parents several times a week. He's able to have a pretty decent relationship with them even though we're physically far apart. We even get to make calls to five European countries for no extra charge. This allowed us to have an hour-long phone call with Mom on Mother's Day while she was traveling through England a couple years back. Vonage works through a broadband internet connection rather than a traditional phone line. This was a problem on Thursday when the router that makes all of this happen acted strangely after the power came back on.
On top of that, the monitor that we use with two of our computers was goofed up by the power outage. This monitor has always been a little flaky. We had to send it in for warranty repair two summers ago when the power went off while the monitor was in energy saver mode. When we called, we were told that this particular monitor didn't handle that situation very well, so when we got it back from warranty repair we got into the habit of actually turning it off instead of allowing it to enter energy saver mode.
We also put all of our electronics on brand new, quality surge protectors that summer since the power company was having problems keeping the power on in our block. The transformer blew several times that summer. It is kind of frustrating that these things still had problems even though they are on surge protectors.
This put us in a terrible situation. We are a four computer family. That's right 1.33 computers per person in our family. Timothy's computer went down with a corrupted hard drive a couple of weeks ago and hasn't been repaired yet. This monitor, through a KVM switch, allowed us to use our Mac and PC desktops. So we were down to our laptop. Even that had only a flaky internet connection because our router was being goofy. I tried for several hours to fix the router and didn't quite get it. I did discover that if the phone was taken off-hook during the few seconds that the phone line was active it would remain active during the duration of the time the phone was off-hook. This allowed us to have a steady internet connection since the router would not reset either. It also meant no phone calls, but that wasn't a big deal since we couldn't get phone calls while the router was acting up and we hardly ever receive a phone call anyway.
That night during family prayers we asked that we would be able to figure out what to do about our computer situation. After getting Timothy to bed, I shopped very briefly for a replacement monitor and router. I was discouraged by the prices I was seeing. To get a roughly equal replacement monitor and router we were looking at roughly $500. Seeing as how we are in the middle of our surprise bathroom remodel, we didn't need to be spending that much money on anything.
I left the phone off the hook overnight so that our computer could do it's early morning updates and unplugged the monitor to see if an extended unplugged period would resurrect it.
The next morning when I put the phone back on the hook it continued to work. It had apparently fixed itself. When I plugged in the monitor it was still doing its no response to the power button thing and no picture thing. Oh well, at least not having to replace the router was going to save us a little over $100.
When I got home from work on Friday, I tried plugging in the monitor one more time. Still no luck. As I was leaving the room I had a bit of inspiration. I flipped the KVM switch to the Mac, which was off, and then plugged the monitor in. When it turned on it flickered a bit, which gave me a ray of hope. When I switch the KVM back to the PC, I suddenly had a picture and was able to turn the monitor off and on. Hurrah. I guess it needed to be plugged in while not receiving a video signal. We had left our PC on, and therefore transmitting a video signal to our busted monitor, because we use it to record TV and didn't want to miss any of our shows.
In our family prayers on Friday night we thanked Heavenly Father for helping us get our computers fixed so that we didn't have to waste money replacing things.
Sorry for the long post, but it's a long story.
Not only did our ultrasound not provide us with the gender of our baby, as previously noted, but the power went out at our house for about half an hour. Half an hour without power is not too big a deal, but the shock was too much for a few of our electronics.
We use Vonage for our phone service. I like Vonage a lot. It allows us to make calls anywhere in the U.S. for a flat monthly rate without a per-minute charge. This allows Timothy to call my parents several times a week. He's able to have a pretty decent relationship with them even though we're physically far apart. We even get to make calls to five European countries for no extra charge. This allowed us to have an hour-long phone call with Mom on Mother's Day while she was traveling through England a couple years back. Vonage works through a broadband internet connection rather than a traditional phone line. This was a problem on Thursday when the router that makes all of this happen acted strangely after the power came back on.
On top of that, the monitor that we use with two of our computers was goofed up by the power outage. This monitor has always been a little flaky. We had to send it in for warranty repair two summers ago when the power went off while the monitor was in energy saver mode. When we called, we were told that this particular monitor didn't handle that situation very well, so when we got it back from warranty repair we got into the habit of actually turning it off instead of allowing it to enter energy saver mode.
We also put all of our electronics on brand new, quality surge protectors that summer since the power company was having problems keeping the power on in our block. The transformer blew several times that summer. It is kind of frustrating that these things still had problems even though they are on surge protectors.
This put us in a terrible situation. We are a four computer family. That's right 1.33 computers per person in our family. Timothy's computer went down with a corrupted hard drive a couple of weeks ago and hasn't been repaired yet. This monitor, through a KVM switch, allowed us to use our Mac and PC desktops. So we were down to our laptop. Even that had only a flaky internet connection because our router was being goofy. I tried for several hours to fix the router and didn't quite get it. I did discover that if the phone was taken off-hook during the few seconds that the phone line was active it would remain active during the duration of the time the phone was off-hook. This allowed us to have a steady internet connection since the router would not reset either. It also meant no phone calls, but that wasn't a big deal since we couldn't get phone calls while the router was acting up and we hardly ever receive a phone call anyway.
That night during family prayers we asked that we would be able to figure out what to do about our computer situation. After getting Timothy to bed, I shopped very briefly for a replacement monitor and router. I was discouraged by the prices I was seeing. To get a roughly equal replacement monitor and router we were looking at roughly $500. Seeing as how we are in the middle of our surprise bathroom remodel, we didn't need to be spending that much money on anything.
I left the phone off the hook overnight so that our computer could do it's early morning updates and unplugged the monitor to see if an extended unplugged period would resurrect it.
The next morning when I put the phone back on the hook it continued to work. It had apparently fixed itself. When I plugged in the monitor it was still doing its no response to the power button thing and no picture thing. Oh well, at least not having to replace the router was going to save us a little over $100.
When I got home from work on Friday, I tried plugging in the monitor one more time. Still no luck. As I was leaving the room I had a bit of inspiration. I flipped the KVM switch to the Mac, which was off, and then plugged the monitor in. When it turned on it flickered a bit, which gave me a ray of hope. When I switch the KVM back to the PC, I suddenly had a picture and was able to turn the monitor off and on. Hurrah. I guess it needed to be plugged in while not receiving a video signal. We had left our PC on, and therefore transmitting a video signal to our busted monitor, because we use it to record TV and didn't want to miss any of our shows.
In our family prayers on Friday night we thanked Heavenly Father for helping us get our computers fixed so that we didn't have to waste money replacing things.
Sorry for the long post, but it's a long story.
I'm so glad your answer was "yes."
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I followed all that technology, but good for you!! I have also been blessed by spontaneous electronic healing on occasion, and am ever so thankful for it because it is truly a miracle as far as I am concerned.
ReplyDelete