The Y2K4 bug (1 of 2)

If I have internet access tomorrow, I'll truly be amazed.

For the past, oh I dunno, few years, I've had a cable modem.  Through my cable company.  But my cable company was not my ISP.  (Nor is AOL, actually.)  What happened was that my cable company had an arrangement with a big ISP, so the cable modem went through them.

This has, for those years, been a pretty darn good arrangement (excepting whenever something went wrong, because each company could then blame the other).  But now, their partnership has come to an end. 

A few months ago, I was alerted that my account with the ISP was going to be terminated and I'd get my service directly through the cable company's own ISP.  (I could, of course, keep the account with the old ISP if I'd pay for it.)  Switching was not necessarily a bad thing -- the ISP I was losing was the email address I gave to everyone I did business with on the internet.  So, with the exception of eight or nine places I actually wanted to receive mail from (like amazon or hotwire or stuff like that), the only people who mailed me at the address were spammers.

They said the account was going to terminate November 30.  Before I left for my trip, I started up an email account with cablecompany.net, and changed over my registrations at the 8 or 9 companies.  That was all I did -- it was all they ever asked me to do.  Nobody asked me to change the configuration of my modem which, as far as I know (and my knowledge is concededly a bit spotty here) is still set up to hunt down the internet via the ISP.