Sunday, September 5, 2010

I'm Back!

Sorry if you've been missing me; I've been sans internet at home for the past month and I just don't find the desire to stay later at work just to use the internet.

While I love the internet and realize how essential technology is to society today, I would be perfectly happy if I never had to deal with tech issues ever again. It seems they always choose to pop up at the absolute worst time at work, and then I have to call IT, wait for them to come to my office (which is 30 minutes from them), and figure out what to do with myself in the meantime when I really need a computer to do my work. Even worse though, is the tech issues I face at home, without the support of an IT team.

Last night I battled the internet for a solid 3.5 hours. I just got it installed in my apartment yesterday, but I didn't have it activated because I decided I was going to buy a wireless adapter for my desktop rather than run a cable through the entire apartment. So last night at 9:30 I got home from shopping, wireless adapter in hand. Then I had to completely disconnect my desktop in my room and set it up out in the living room where the modem is. Then I connected the ethernet cable directly from the modem to my computer to activate the internet. Of course that didn't work as it was supposed to so I had to call Comcast at 10pm. They got my internet working which was amazing to finally have back, I can't lie. At that point I was supposed to disconnect my internet, unplug the modem, hook everything up to the wireless router, and turn everything back on 1 piece of equipment at a time (all in a very specific order), in order to have the internet running through the router. I was terrified this wouldn't go to plan and I would again be without internet after just getting it back, so I delayed this for about an hour and checked e-mail, Facebook, and chatted with a dear friend. When I was finally ready I re-connected everything to the router and the internet still worked perfectly with the cable running from the router to the desktop. Now that I was sure the router was working, I tried to set up my wireless adapter. I followed the installation steps on the CD and got it hooked up, only I had no idea how to choose a network, where to set up the network, etc. I thought I had created a network like 4 different times, but every time, nothing worked! After about 45 minutes I finally uninstalled the wireless adapter and backed up to working with the router. I put in that installation CD (which I did not do before), and was instantly walked through creating my network that I would use with the adapter. It was all making sense now. So after that step was complete, I put in the installation CD for the adapter and re-installed that. Everything worked beautifully at that point, so I turned off my computer and went through the process of moving it back to my room. Of course once I was connected in my room again, the adapter wasn't working. It would work for about a minute, but then it would start scanning for networks and a message was telling me there was no connection. I figured I was too far from the modem (although my apartment is only 923 sq feet). I reconnected things, uninstalled and re-installed the adapter 2 more times, did everything I could think of, then finally gave up and fell asleep at 1:30am.

This morning I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the adapter one more time, and low-and-behold, it's working! Hence my ability to post this entry. Anyway, the moral of this story: I hate technology!! At least when it's not working like it's supposed to.

I'm off to church now. Have a great day.

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