Yesterday

Late Friday night (ok, early Saturday morning) my cable Internet went out. The cable modem's lights were all wonky (technical term :-). But I didn't feel like dealing with customer (dis)service. So I went to bed.

When I got up, I checked and things were still not working.

So I called. The tech (of course) wanted me to reboot. And I knew he'd want me connected directly to the modem. So I dug out the laptop (crawling around under the desk to *try* to get at the cables on the back of either Windows box is out of the question).

Of course, it's an old P-133, so it takes forever to boot. And then the guy wants me to remove the TCP/IP stack for the network card. This involves doing it, rebooting, restoring it, and rebooting again. Somewhere in there (this takes a long time on this old laptop) he hung up on me.

So I called again. This time I got a different guy who listened to me description of the lights on the cable modem and told me that it was in standby mode (which apparently can happen if there are connection problems). The cable and PC Link light were on, the power light wasn't.

So he tell's me to press the power button to take it out of standby. And it takes off like nothing had ever been wrong. GRRRR!

Why couldn't the *first* tech have told me that?

I'll be glad when Comcast replaces these clowns. They've got the occasional good tech (like the second one I got). And a lot of "I have to read the script" types. :-(

Then Saturday night, I discover that my domain is down. Or rather, that the system hosting it seems unreachable. I left an AIM message for the guy who runs it and got awakened by a call rather earlier than I wanted to be (but at a not unreasonable hour for "normal" folks on a Sunday).

Seems that the outfit he'd gotten his IP address block from had gone under. He'd thought he had another week to swap the IP addresses. He didn't. So there was much frantic scrambling around, and he gave me a workaround to *fetch* my mail.

Of course, for the 12 or so hours left until the new address propagates thru the DNS servers, nobody can *send* me any mail.

Meanwhile, I spent most of Saturday trying to sort thru the many gigabytes of downloaded files I've got. In the process I cursed Microsoft many times. Seems that there's a memory leak in Windows Explorer. After using it to shuffle files for a couple of hours, the system (which started out with 70% of system resources free) would have less than 1%. And have to be rebooted.
And often have to be rebooted again as this system gets "picky" about reboots and sometimes takes two or three reboots to get a "good" one.

I spent 12-16 hours shuffling files. You do the math. :-(

But I am eliminating a lot of dupes caused by folks repacking files into different archive formats or the same format with different compression options. My dupe checker can't catch that. But when I unpack the files it can. So I'm slowly proceeding.

If they define marriage as "one man and one woman"...

... expect to see the following scenes:

"I'm sorry, but you were born male, so you can't marry this man even though you've had gender re-assignment surgery" (already the law in several states!)

"Yes, you were born male, but you've had gender re-assignment surgery, so you can't marry this woman". (also the law in several states, and I'm told that in at least one, TSes can't marry *anyone*!!!)

"Your marriage is being annulled because your husband's relatives challenged it and our genetic tests show that you aren't an XX female" (possible under laws a few places, but hasn't come up *yet*).

And so on.

It's not merely that gays won't be able to marry gays. But that there are a *lot* of folks whose bodies don't match their genes. For example, androgen insensitivity will produce a person who is genetically an XY male, but physically a woman.

There are other effects that will cause an XX or XY baby to develop the "wrong" genitals or at least "ambiguous" ones.

And then you get into all the genetic combos *other* than XX and XY. Including people who have different genes in different parts of their bodies. Yes, such actually exist.

Together these amount to around 1 in 1000 in the population. That's roughly 300,000 in the US.

Sooner or later, these folks are going to *force* a break in the "there are only two, easily identifiable, sexes". Any law that pretends things are that simple is doomed. Because it'd require so much fiddling to "define" what was a "man" and what was a "woman" that all but the most "fanatic" judge would have to throw up his hands and say "this is not workable, nor is it fair."

But there will be a lot of unhappy folks in the meantime.