I was in lecture at 11:11 AM, but I kept my iPod out so I could screenshot the time.

And just like on January 11, 2011, I missed 11:11 PM, so I have no screenshots of that.

If you’re a website administrator or server tech at your place of work, you probably have a backup plan for if/when the Internet goes down. The complexity and intricacy of your backup plan probably depends on how important the Internet is for you.

As most of you probably already know, I’m the web director at the Badger Herald, which is a newspaper company that publishes all of its content on the Internet as well as in paper form. So, the Internet is pretty important to us, especially because we use the Internet to send all of our pages to the printer every night.

Charter Business Internet decided that today would be a great day to completely fail for all of Madison. I got a handful of texts and a phone call from my co-workers earlier today telling me that the Internet wasn’t working. Although it was a slight annoyance, it wasn’t a huge deal because I had plans for when this would happen, and I was prepared. I called Charter Business and they told me that the Internet in my entire area was down. I asked for an expected repair time, and all they could offer me was “as soon as possible.” I told the customer service representative that we were a newspaper company that relies heavily on the Internet and asked him what he proposes that I do; he said “there is nothing that you are able to do right now.”

I called my co-worker back and told her that Charter was down in our entire region. I suggested that she try and connect to the free unsecured wireless hotspot broadcasted by the business next door to ours; apparently she had already tried that and their Internet is down too because apparently they also use Charter.

So I hopped on the next bus and headed over to the office; while waiting for the bus, I tweeted “Damn you Charter Business Internet.”

After I got to the office, I executed my second backup plan, which is to tether Internet from someone’s phone who had an unlimited data plan. We found a handful of people, and I had a general idea of how to tether, but I’ve never actually tried it and didn’t realize how complicated it was.

Apparently for iPhones, you have to pay your service provider extra money; on top of that, service pro­viders for iPhones don’t offer unlimited data plans yet so you might end up paying overage charges. For Blackberries, you have to download a massive beast of a piece of software from their website to install onto your computer to be able to activate tethering on the phone. For other Android phones (which my deputy had, who also stopped by the office to help), you have to either pay for a third-party app, or follow your carrier’s instructions, pay extra, then have it not work anyway.

While attempting to get something working, I received a tweet from an unexpected person.

As you probably know by now, I’m used to people combing the Internet and figuring out random tidbits of personal information about me. The place where I live isn’t really personal either – I have it posted in a lot of random places. But, I still find it strange that a customer service representative from an Internet provider had the time and motivation to research me because of a random tweet I sent out and make a frail attempt to quell my anger so my 1,000+ followers don’t all think that Charter is horrible.

Which it’s not.

It usually doesn’t fail a lot, but when it does, it fails well, it fails hard, and it fails completely.

Meanwhile, we managed to find a stray Internet connection floating around from a different service provider so we could download the monster Blackberry software so we could install it on someone’s computer and tether Internet from someone’s Blackberry. After about an hour or so, I finally managed to download the entire file. Then I realized my laptop didn’t have Bluetooth so I couldn’t connect to the Blackberry, so I had to transfer the file onto a network drive (which took about 15 minutes) then had to redownload it from a laptop with Bluetooth (which took another 15 minutes or so).

By the time we were ready to install the software…

The Internet came back on.

So here’s my message to Charter: if you’re going to fail at giving Internet for a few hours and make me leave my apartment, go to work, try 18 different things before settling at the best method, wait an hour for a huge file to download, and wait another half hour for the file to transfer to the proper laptop, at least stay out for 3 more minutes so I can feel the glory of solving the problem.

Rather than coming back literally seconds before I was going to have a great success.

What was that? Oh, you want to see a picture of a live starfish in a clear glass container that I looked at during my zoology lab today? No problem.

It was in the process of flipping itself over right-side-up, which is why one of its legs looks like it’s stuck under its body.

In other news, I activated Timeline on my Facebook account today. I’m sure many of you know how much I dislike Facebook, but I decided I would check it out today anyway because simply because I don’t like a website does not mean I should ignore it, especially seeing how popular it is.

According to my timeline, I joined Facebook on July 18, 2007. I read some of my early status updates and saw how angry and violent of an adolescent I was.

Fortunately, one thing Facebook is good at is allowing you to hide all your stuff – my wall has been hidden from the public for over a year now, so these status updates (and the corresponding wall posts) are buried for eternity.

… Unless someone hacks me and makes them public.

Good luck if you’re going to try, because even I have difficulty remembering my Facebook password because it’s so unnecessarily long and complex.

A while back, I got an advertisement email from my university telling me that there was going to be a law discussion today about sports law and intellectual property law. At first, I thought this was going to be an insightful discussion, so I decided to attend.

Ends up, it was just a massive advertisement for two law schools in my area and the programs they offer.

All I got out of it was a huge pile of booklets and no useful information.

I’m disappointed to see that even law schools are engaging in deceptive advertising now.

I am very frustrated right now with the Badger Herald server, so I decided to instead come over to my own website.

For those of you who don’t already know, I’m the web director at the Badger Herald, which means I am responsible for almost everything related to our website and server. Our server decided that this weekend was a great time for it to start dying every few hours, so I’ve been working with the former web director all weekend attempting to figure out what’s wrong with the server.

With the help of our hosting provider, I think our server has finally been somewhat stabilized.

During one particular instance of our website going down, I tried connecting via FTP and SFTP to see if anything other than HTTP was down, and neither of those worked. Then I went to our VPS’s control panel to restart it, and that wasn’t working too. Then I realized it wasn’t a problem with the Badger Herald’s server, but it was a problem with my Internet router randomly deciding to fail at the exact moment that I was on the Badger Herald website.

In other news, I hate it when the transit tracker for the Metro says that the next bus is going to arrive at 5:11 PM, but when I get everything ready and check the tracker again at 5:06 PM right before I leave, the expected arrival time has changed to 5:07 PM and I miss the bus.

I’m such a champion at missing the bus.

Tip of the Day: If your computer stops working, at least make a minimal effort to fix it yourself first and restart it before calling your web/server tech.

Or else your tech (who might be named Parkzer) will walk into the office, approach the broken computer, restart it, watch as it works perfectly fine, and get disappointed and annoyed at you for wasting his time.

In other news, if you are interested in trying the new Gmail layout, there is a button at the bottom right corner of your Gmail that will let you switch.

Apparently that button has been there for a long time, but I just figured out today that it was there.

Why is that, you may ask?

Because the bottom right corner also happens to be the location where the Tasks interface is located.

I always have my task list activated, and at the very least, even if it is not completely open, it is still tabbed in the bottom right corner. Because Google decided it would be a good idea to put both the Switch and the Tasks tab in the exact same location, my Tasks tab completely covered up my Switch tab, so I had no idea I was able to test out the new design until today.

So if you’re someone who also uses Google Tasks, here is your notice to temporarily close Tasks if you want to test out the new layout, so you can actually see the link to try it.