More technical troubles

I ditched my DSL connection in PA in favor of wireless networking with my neighbors' DSL connection next door. Since I only spend around half the year here, it seemed like a waste of money to pay for my own DSL year round. Reception on my laptop is only poor, but we are seldom online at the same time and performance was adequate.

This turned into a disaster.

The DSL line next door went down. Eventually two Verizon technicians showed up and spent over two hours - one working the pole and one in the office. Eventually they decided the modem was fried but they don't carry a replacement on the truck. I gave them the one that came with my service and they got that one to work and left. The next day when we powered up our computers, we were offline again!

Calls to various manufacturer and ISP tech support numbers resulted in lots of frustrating searching through various menus entering arcane subscriber IDs and passwords, and we were back up for a day. Then Verizon decided to send another modem by UPS which arrived about 4 pm Wednesday.

Naturally, the installation process with the supplied CD failed. This led to another tech support call with a very polite man in India who took over an hour explaining various things to try - unplug the modem for 45 seconds, depress the reset button for one minute, etc. Finally, he decided that the computer was faulty and suggested using their laptop to run the installation procedure.

I was online with my laptop at the next desk before the install procedure finished running on their laptop. Who knows why?

Thursday was a washout for health reasons, so now I am back in harness. More politics and such will follow later tonight.

New Photos - check out http://keensphotos.blogspot.com/ for a raft of new photos that have accumulated in the last month which I posted this afternoon.