Life Without Internet

We lost our DSL for three days in the scraper and our connection to the world. It's pathetic, really, how much we depend upon a connection to the Internet! You'd think it would have been a welcome relief. However, although I took all this week off, there was some actual work I had to do at a specific time on Thanksgiving. So we packed up the laptop and drove down to our local pizzeria to sponge off of their free wireless (the pizzeria was closed, but their wireless was still open). I sat in the car for thirty minutes doing my work, while Kurt took pictures and fetched us coffee from the one open place in town -- Starbuck's! So it wasn't all that bad.

We thought the problem with the DSL was the line to the house. But we didn't really investigate very hard at first. On Friday, Kurt went down to Fry's and bought a new modem, to make sure the modem wasn't the problem (ours old modem was the first generation DSL modem... six years old, so it was amazing it still worked). Still didn't work. So we plugged the modem into the test port on the phone junction box (outside the house), and that did work. So, for the third time, we relocated the DSL, this time to the master bedroom (the opposite side of the house).

We now have both the phone and the DSL plugged into the test port on the outside of the house, and wires strung into the windows. The joys of scraper living! The inside wiring off this place is so noisy, we have given up trying to get it to work for real, and hopefully this solution will work until we have to move out. Despite the fact that it's not our house, we really hate to have our landlord put any money into a place that's destined for destruction.

We had to relocate the office into the second bedroom, which was the room we'd originally planned to set up the office in. So Kurt had to set up the desk, which has been disassembled since we moved in here. As a result, it's starting to feel more like we live here than like we're just squatting. (I'm a bit fearful that this could portend having to move out sooner than later as Murphy's Law kicks in!)

The upside of all this is that the wireless and DSL work much better than they ever have, and I have good wireless in the parts of the house that I frequent. The old setup was at the opposite extremity of the house, and didn't reach well into the bedroom.