I’ve been up over an hour and I could not get myself to write a post today. I had been “absent” in writing posts because of the typhoon and the sudden loss of internet connection. I tried writing a new blog post last Monday, but the strong typhoon knocked out the electricity. That day was one of my favorite commenter’s birthday, Pastilan, but somehow the typhoon really knocked me off and I simply found myself I watching the rain and the wind outside my window. Before the day ended, electricity was back and my senior-age father gleefully turned on my computer and was very glad to see that the internet was not affected by the strong weather.

photo credit: lusi (SXC)

As my father was midway surfing the internet, he suddenly complained that his beloved Firefox browser does not work anymore. When I checked, I told him that the internet is down that is why he could not get any access to it. I tried to check all the hardware and software settings, and seeing that there seemed to be nothing wrong, I call up my internet provider support. I reported to them about the sudden loss of internet traffic.

Then I got up early the next day, even if the cold weather invited me to stay in the covers and snuggle up to my kid’s warm body. I turned on my PC and I still noticed the absence of internet connection. I thought, “I’d probably be missing some opportunities today. I’d better finish up some work that does not need any internet connection.” So I did that offline work for three hours. I was planning to work up some long definitive posts for “The Lady Programmer” but I found myself unable to do the task. Later that day, I decided to do some of the usual weekly computer maintenance work that I do each Monday (you know, the housekeeping stuff like organizing my files, throwing out garbage and cleaning out my hard drive).

photo credit: bies (SXC)

As I did my preventive maintenance work on my PC, I suddenly thought of checking my antivirus firewall. Could there be a virus that gobbled up my internet? Could my personal firewall suddenly acting up to block all of my internet connection? I decided to take out the firewall in my antivirus, and lo! I was suddenly online! I had the internet in my hands! All the time that I lost the connection I was blaming the ISP for it. Poor tech support guys. They might be up on their feet figuring out why I had lost my internet connection. Well, I think those customer support people should add a checklist on checking a computer’s firewall settings.

Now I had to temporary disable my antivirus settings everytime I get to login to my account. I turned on my Windows firewall. I’ll have to replace my ESET Smart Security to their non-firewall version later today.