Diary of a Wolfeman

So The WBGF has been living on dial-up for ages (she gets her high-speed fix at work) but I’m an addict, and I sometimes get pinged for on-call work on the weekends while I’m at her place and essentially disconnected. I finally conned her into getting DSL, and tonight went over to set up the new modem.

Run the setup program on her PC, and it crashes the install. Gotta love stupid software. Hook everything up, install the filters, but the modem won’t train. Get out my wiring kit, trace the line back to the box, rewire to another pair and clean 30 years of corrosion off the jacks – still won’t train. Bite the bullet and call TS. Get nice, enthusiastic native-born-English-speaking lass on the phones who can’t have been employed long, as the disdain and lack of faith in her fellow man had not set in yet. Anyway, they try some things with Tier II, but still no love from the modem. Schedule a truck roll for Saturday. Ten minutes later, I realized that I had forgot to remove the line cord from the frelling dial-up modem.

D’oh!!

Okay, re-arrange the wires, and the modem links up no problem. Back to the install software, which just never quite gets it. Being prepared, I whip out my trusty laptop and run the setup program from there – lo and Behold! We have Internet! (Yay!). Now to set up the wireless router. Look at the install poster, follow the instructions, and the software can’t figure a damn thing out.

Why am I not surprised?

Ditch the install disk, fire up the router, pull an IP address and Firefox to the admin page. Type the default password from memory, and bingo. Ten minutes later, new admin password, new SSID and one happily convoluted WPA key is programmed in and I have wireless.

And Tolerant’s first question (smart girl that she is) was “so, where’s the power switch on this thing so I can disconnect you when you get sucked in?”