The router saga (raiders of the lost blog)

I'm trying to recall all of what I wrote in the lost blog from last night. As I had spent 45 minutes on it, it was insightful, poignant and funny. I will try to recapture all of this as best as I can. This entry will probably be none of those. Life is like that, when you get two steps ahead you get knocked back at least one and a half steps, sometimes three. Here goes nothing. . .

My internet connection at home has become a bit of a burden, a worrisome, meddlesome, irritating, annoying burden. My roommate, as I had stated in an earlier post, purchased a router. Of course we are quite cheap people and we purchased the one with the largest rebate amount. I think it is a "linksys" or something like that. I'm sure it works fine. (NOT) So since one cannot have two cable modems we have a router now. (Does that make me the LAN administrator here?)

So we bring the router home and my roommate hands me the router. We run the cables, we hook the cables up, and we plug in the router and power it and the cable modem up. HEY! We have internet in both rooms. YAY! Not more than 15 minutes later the internet cuts out. Huh?!? We unplug and plug the power cords back in. We're back up. Ok, must have been some sort of a glitch.

I can't get the internet to work on a regular basis so I call my friendly assistance guy. His name is TJ and I think that he's beginning to hate me. Yeah, I know his name, he knows my name as well. He must dread seeing my account number come up on his screen. "Here comes that computer idiot again." Is what he has to be thinking every time we speak.

"Unplug the router."

Check.

"Unplug the cable modem."

Check

"Turn your computer completely off."

Check (3 minutes later of course, I want to shut windows down properly.)

"Wait for 1 minute. Power up the cable modem. Now power up the router. Turn on your computer."

Check. Check. Check.

Pause for about 3 minutes while the little gerbils inside begin to run on their little wheel.

Okay the internet works now, I say goodbye to TJ and begin the process of checking out all of the required programs. Explorer works, AIM works, BearShare works. I'm back in business.

About 2 hours later, which is conveniently an hour after the help desk closes, the connection fails again. I perform the power down ritual once again. It comes back up. I'm happy. It crashes. I'm frustrated.

I call my IT friend. I interrupt his spades game and his latte drinking to explain my catastrophe. He asks me what the computer did when I installed the software. Software? There is software involved? I asked my roommate. Somewhere in his room there was a router box with an unopened installation cd. Ok, ok, ok. Eureka! Yippie-ki-yay motherf*ker!!!! It's a software problem. I install the software and continue onward and upward.

Everything works. Explorer works. AIM works. Even BearShare works.

I start entering a blog entry, 45 minutes later I hit the "publish" button.

SERVER NOT FOUND

Server not found? I hit the "back" button on the browser. White screen. I hit the "refresh" button. White screen. The little windows flag in the top right is waving like it's actually doing something. Yeah, it's freaking mocking me now.

The cursing begins. My roommate asks what's wrong. I tell him that for the rest of the evening, if he hears cursing that his best course of action is to laugh to himself and not approach me or my room. He agreed and I was able to continue my ranting and cursing. After about an hour of messing around with the connection, I was able to write my previous post.

I feel better now. But in the future, if any of my readership knows of any problems that I might encounter...please let me know. This learning by trial and error makes me a miserable son-of-a-gun.