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swestrupIt wasn't exactly between 1:00 and 5:00 pm yesterday, but a Bell technician did show and he fixed my internet. Unfortunately, the word 'Fixed' has multiple meanings. One is to make something work right, and the other involves cutting its balls off. Guess which he did?
Okay, so its not really that bad. There seems to be a short on one of the phone lines in the house. I even have some suspicions of where that might be; namely where the dead air conditioner spewed its liquid contents onto the floor when I took it out of the window. There's a phone jack right there. The very same one I plug the ADSL modem into. I'll have to look into that.
Meanwhile the (rather nice) technician installed a freebie ADSL isolator in the basement so that I have a place where I can plug the modem in and have guaranteed maximum-speed service. Of course, the actual modem and computer are 2 floors up and half a floor over. The Bell guy seemed to think that just running a 100' phone cable from the basement to the modem should have everything working better than ever.
Of course, one needs to have a 100' phone cable. Today's job is to go out and get one or, failing that, to go to the local dollar store and buy 4 of their 25' phone extension cables at $1 each, and then run them through the walls. Meanwhile don't expect to see me online much until its fixed.
You can garner some measure of my desperation in the fact that I'm posting this from a McCafe while drinking a McCoffee. I did try using my old dial-up modem, but it also thought the phone-line quality sucked badly. I couldn't get more that 9600 baud out of my 56K modem, and even then the line would reset every couple of minutes.
So, item #Third-Infinity+472 on my ever-expanding, fractal to-do list is to check into the phone short. I've suspected that there was a short in that jack since shortly after it was installed, since its a 2-line jack (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
taxlady and I each having our own phone lines) with two lines going into it, and only one works.
When the jack was first installed (by me, I think, although there is a chance that an old friend of mine who goes by PGM was involved), I had no way of diagnosing the problem so I could fix it. By the time I had bought some simple phone testing equipment, that corner of the office was behind a desk and a tangle of wires, and I've never bothered to move the desk far enough out of the way to fix things. I guess I have a reason to do so now.
Okay, so its not really that bad. There seems to be a short on one of the phone lines in the house. I even have some suspicions of where that might be; namely where the dead air conditioner spewed its liquid contents onto the floor when I took it out of the window. There's a phone jack right there. The very same one I plug the ADSL modem into. I'll have to look into that.
Meanwhile the (rather nice) technician installed a freebie ADSL isolator in the basement so that I have a place where I can plug the modem in and have guaranteed maximum-speed service. Of course, the actual modem and computer are 2 floors up and half a floor over. The Bell guy seemed to think that just running a 100' phone cable from the basement to the modem should have everything working better than ever.
Of course, one needs to have a 100' phone cable. Today's job is to go out and get one or, failing that, to go to the local dollar store and buy 4 of their 25' phone extension cables at $1 each, and then run them through the walls. Meanwhile don't expect to see me online much until its fixed.
You can garner some measure of my desperation in the fact that I'm posting this from a McCafe while drinking a McCoffee. I did try using my old dial-up modem, but it also thought the phone-line quality sucked badly. I couldn't get more that 9600 baud out of my 56K modem, and even then the line would reset every couple of minutes.
So, item #Third-Infinity+472 on my ever-expanding, fractal to-do list is to check into the phone short. I've suspected that there was a short in that jack since shortly after it was installed, since its a 2-line jack (
taxlady and I each having our own phone lines) with two lines going into it, and only one works.When the jack was first installed (by me, I think, although there is a chance that an old friend of mine who goes by PGM was involved), I had no way of diagnosing the problem so I could fix it. By the time I had bought some simple phone testing equipment, that corner of the office was behind a desk and a tangle of wires, and I've never bothered to move the desk far enough out of the way to fix things. I guess I have a reason to do so now.
