Nothing (much) To Report

I could have done without experiencing that week. Far too many little annoyances that have made me swear, scream and make some very angry faces.

Monday night there was a power cut in the local area; it was late and I was safely tucked up in bed, listening to music. I was a tad miffed at the loss of my evening audio entertainment but otherwise not bothered. It’s not the end of the world to lose power for 15-20 minutes. Unless it fucks up your internet connection in the process.

I called the isp, and received no assistance, which was a first as they’re usually very good with the helpful advice and problem solving. I was alone with my problem *sob*. I came to the conclusion late on Tuesday afternoon that perhaps the pc had been somehow corrupted in the power cut and thus the router wasn’t being recognised. So, that night I started the tedious process of reinstalling Windows, again! One day I’ll figure out that this isn’t the way to fix problems.

Wednesday brought many reboots of the pc, cable modem and router and cable jiggling which solved nowt. I however reached an important ratiocination: if there wasn’t a probably with the modem and pc bits it must, by deduction, be the router bit. More swearing followed in trying to unplug the cable out of the back of the pc that lead to the aforementioned suspected faulty equipment. It’s a tricky bugger, for some reason. It merely added to the high levels of frustration that I was already feeling.

Having struggled with more cables, and another reboot I discovered what a 10Mb download speed should feel like. The woo! moment didn’t last, despite the fabulously quick web page loading. I may have wasted a little time in doing nonessential, not-working-to-fix-the-problem type of stuff, but after the reinstall, I did have to go through the lengthy process of downloading and updating anything Windows-esque, and installing all those fabulous little programs that I like to clutter up the computer with. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to shrink my unread Bloglines list - I fear that’s now a war I shall never win, I stopped trying to fight the battle some time ago. Thankfully I had concentrated hard enough to hunt down the troubleshooting page for the router. Which was probably the best move I’d made in a few days. I realisation that I could fix everything with a tiny, hidden button delivered a bigger woo moment than seeing the BBC homepage load in the blink of an eye. Who knew there was a reset button there?! It wasn’t pictured in any diagram amongst the setup instructions, and was only mentioned in a general, passing kind of way in the manual. I’d only wasted the day doing nothing important whilst waiting on important things, it could have been worse.

Cables reinstated, reset complete, reboot done, I thought normal service could now resume. Craply, my brother’s pc wouldn’t reconnect so I had to faff around with the placement of the router and various settings which had bugger all effect on his wireless pc and this laptop. I was far too angsty, tired and generally pissed off with the lot of it, following a mostly sleepless night and more hormones than I actually like roaming freely around my system. I’ve spent all day today rebooting every time the connection disappeared into thin air, and I probably shouldn’t have tried logging on IRC at all, but I was being optimistic that the problem would sort its self out, and that I might have a conversation with someone.

I did the final reset & reboot about an hour ago and, crucially, ensured all the settings were more or less how they were before the mild inconvenience at the start of the week. Thus I write this from reasonable comfort, although not bed, which is where I really should be. The fool that I am.