internet outage

My family had a moped when I was a kid, a yellow Motobecane (a French brand) that looked like a little 50cc motorcycle. It had wire side-baskets. My Mom used it to go to the grocery store sometimes, a brown grocery bag in each basket as she zoomed home in a white 3/4 "jet-pilot" helmet. A few years later I used it for my paper route. You couldn't really get all the Sunday papers for the route in those 2 baskets, but you could jam quite a few in there, and it sure beat carrying all of them on your back. My Dad (who to his everlasting credit would get up on Sundays and help me out with deliveries) has a friend who thanks his years working for the postal service for his back trouble; I sometimes wonder if my slouchy posture owes something to the Sunday edition of the Grand Rapids Press.

The moped developed a compression problem with its little one-cylinder, 2-cycle engine. You had to pedal to start the thing up, and eventually it wouldn't start. But I discovered by experimenting with it that I could still get it started if I rotated the flywheel with my hand to the point of maximum resistance. No idea why this worked, but it did.

I was thinking about that moped today. I got up here to CTC to use the internet, and the proxy server is down. My browser tells me that the proxy server is refusing connections. This has been a problem on and off here for several days. Email still works, so I'm posting this via email. But the net is down.

Or mostly down, anyway. I immediately tried bypassing the proxy server and connecting directly to the net, but that didn't work. And then, on a whim, I tried connecting to facebook.com with https instead of http. And it went through. So, oddly, http won't work with the proxy but https will. Almost nothing on the net that I use requires https (a higher-security protocol most often used for passwords and purchases), but it turns out that a little bit of facebook does.

Rotate the flywheel a bit. Who knows? It might work.