Imagine my disappointment yesterday when I discovered my network down.I had been planning for over a week to spend last night augmenting my quick Latin grammar site by writing a short exposé on Latin conditionals with references to conditional sentences in English and French, the only other languages in which I've any competence to speak authoritatively about this grammatical construct, basically a work of comparative linguistics. In short, I was planning some really good fun.
Instead, I came home to find my house network in tatters, my router utterly un-resurrectable, and my new router difficult to configure. (Well, it was my good fortune, I suppose, even to have a spare router available to install.)
I spent my whole evening getting everything back up and working. I even missed the early minutes of The Event, one of the dramas I try to follow, and raced back to my den every commercial break (by which time I was wrestling with how to get my new router to forward ports 80, 22, etc. through to various of my Linux hosts).
Alas, uesperem perditi.*
What I should have done is to yield to the temptation I repressed to purchase a pie on the way home from work. It was Pi Day after all, and last night's "blood bath" would have been a more suitable celebration of the Ides of March (today) in marking the two thousand fifty-fith anniversary of Cæsar's assassination.
But then, my websites would still be down as I write this.
* Yes, "I lost the evening"—in direct allusion to Vercingetorix' exclamatory utterance as he deposited his weapons in defeat at the knees of Julius Cæsar at Alesia in 52 BC. (See illustration above—I like the ones that surface in various episodes of the comic book, Asterix the Gaul, better, but they're under copyright.)
