Today I figured two things out: why my room is so cold, and why my internet was cut off.
My room is hovering around fifty degrees right now. Why is it chilly now when it was perfectly reasonable when I was checking out the apartment? Apparantly, a few days ago the landlord sent people over, who took away the storm windows in my room and the bathroom. There were some indications that eventually, they would come back and reinstall better storm windows… but until then, all that’s left are single panes of glass, which don’t have significantly different insulating properties than the air around them. Moreover, the only thermostat in the apartment is in the room farthest away from my own. Because I don’t really want to spend lots of heating money, I’m going to stick with a policy of keeping the doors to the cold rooms shut, and just not hanging around in them that much. The rest of the apartment seems warm enough… but again, because of the location of the thermostat and the closed doors, the heaters in my room aren’t even on.
My internet was simpler to figure out, and easier to fix. I installed ZoneAlarm a little while ago, mostly to prove that it wasn’t a virus on my computer which was killing the internet at the fraternity. Of course, it’s only a trial installation, so it’s taken to complaining that I haven’t registered it yet. Now, if you just click the ‘Close’ button, it shuts down the frontend of the program, but doesn’t actually deactivate the daemon which monitors the network traffic from your computer. And the default policy of that daemon is to block all packets into and out of the computer; it usually maintains a white list of programs allowed to send and receive packets, but that is maintained in the frontend… Essentially, i had to restart the program, find the ‘continue the trial’ button, and hit that. This allowed the whitelist to publish itself, which in turn made the internet come back.
It wasn’t a severe issue, anyway. As soon as I’m done typing this post, I’m going to find something warmer to do. Outside my room. Where my fingers aren’t numb.
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