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I love the smell of burnt circuits in the morning!
Actually, no, I don’t, but it was a good, catchy line. So, it turns out that, yes, my DSL router got kissed by lightning and cooked. Actually, just the DSL modem part got cooked, but that was enough to keep me from getting to the Internet. And, to add insult to injury, I also lost several network cards. So, I spent the better part of the week scrounging up network cards, testing them, findind drivers for them, and replacing dead cards at home. Saturday afternoon, I had a tech over who took all of about 10 seconds to confirm that it was, in fact, my DSL Router that had gone all crispy.
In fact, his whole visit lasted all of about 15 minutes. I wore my new Novell Cool Solutions Tip T-shirt, in lovely Hunter Green, which arrived Thursday night, just so he could see I was a real geek. He took one look at that, my Wall O’ Computer Books (most of which are terribly out of date), all the equipment laying about and basically got out of my way. He metered the line, then offered to sell me a router out of his truck. It cost at least twice what it was worth, but saved me the hassle of configuring it and let me test while he was still there. Another 10 minutes to change out the last bad network card and reconfigure my BorderManager firewall, then I was back up and running.
Actually, I did get a bit more reading done than I would have otherwise this past week. And, I was less obsessive about the new game I’m playing on-line (more about that on Friday). Still, it’s nice to have e-mail again. And, I think my wife likes having access to the ‘Net again, too. So, it’s back to wasting time as normal for us. Wee!
