Monday night late I noticed that my web log was no longer accessible from the Internet.
The problem didn’t seem to be any of the problems I was having earlier with getting
the right setup. So, this afternoon for lunch I spent a fair amount of time on the
phone with Cable One trying to get the problem fixed. It turned out that the problem
was that my Internet Protocol address (IP address) was supposed to be permanently
assigned, but the Cable One tech didn’t do the order correctly to get everything
set up.

So, sometime in the next 24 hours they will finally get me back online. In the meantime,
I’ve been working on figuring out why e-mail postings haven’t been working. That
problem turned out to be a rookie programming mistake. When I took my first programming
class at Purdue University in 1968, the instructor told us that by the end of the
class if we learned nothing else, we would learn that we didn’t know how to count.
Counting in a computer program turns out to be quite complex. Do you count before
or after the event? Do you test the count before counting or after counting? How
does the programming language count — from 0 or from 1 (that is, is the first
instance 0 or is the first instance 1?). This weblog is written in a language
that counts from zero. So, the first e-mail message found on an iteration is the
zeroth message, the next one (if there is one) is the oneth record, and so on. I was
counting from zero but testing against a count from one. A good rookie mistake that
I’ve made several times (and will likely make again!).

So, if you’re reading this, Cable One has fixed their mistake and I’ve fixed mine.
Aren’t computers wonderful?