DSL!

Hey, guys.

So Mom and I finally got fed up with our less than stellar dial-up and decided to get ourselvs DSL for Christmas. Not that we celebrate Christmas exactly, because, you know, agnostic and lapsed pagan. But we have a tree, have always had a tree even though we never did the church thing (and my cat's new name is "Get away from the fucking Christmas tree!" but that's a whole 'nother story.)

Anyway. So we finally got our stuff together and called our ISP last week to see about getting DSL- we knew they had it, just weren't sure they'd have it in our area. If they hadn't, we'd have been stuck with the phone company, who a.) get enough of our money and b.) kind of suck in that "we're trying to take over the world, tee-hee" kind of way.

We still have to pay them $4 or something a month to run the DSL through their line, but whatever. They're a hell of a lot more expensive than my ISP, too, and not nearly as nice or easy to deal with on the phone. I hate calling tech support- had some very bad experiences when I was a teenager- and I will call these people.

So we talked to the ISP guy, and he explained how it worked- they told the phone company to switch over our line, and when that was done they'd let us know. He said it usually took about 3 weeks. So imagine my surprise when Fex-Ex showed up yesterday with a box addressed to me that appeared to contain a modem. (I called Mom, just to make sure it wasn't a Christmas present for me, but I was pretty sure what it was.)

Then, around quarter to 5:00, I got a couple emails from my ISP. One says "we shipped your modem yesterday from a place in state." Another says "Your DSL should be activated on 12/19, please make sure your modem is hooked up, and call us if it doesn't work."

THEN- while I'm running around the living room going "this is cool, but I have no clue what I'm doing!" the doorbell rings.

UPS. With the books we ordered from Barns and Noble. "DSL for Dummies" which unfortunately is missing its table of contents, and has a 2002 copyright date, damnit, and "Networking for Dummies." Because we're going to need a router, and PC cards. Or at least a PC card- Mom's gonna have to get a new computer, which she's kind of been looking at anyway.

So, here we are. December 19. I didn't think I'd have this to play with before I had to go back to school, so I'm very jazzed.

I'm going to go read some stuff in our books (and an older one I bought for XP when I got this computer) and then I'm going to go haul Anna and her stuff into Mom's room and see if I can get it to work.

If not, the dialup's still going, so I'll be back. But... yeah.

Anyone have any advice about routers, networking, anything like that? Or other DSL-y stuff I might need to know? Please share. Thanks. :)

(As an aside, I discovered that Darth there is the closest to a 'happy' icon I have. The rest are a bit... dare I say 'moody'? Except the writing one, which just doesn't quite fit. I might need to work on this.)

...Or not.

...Well, this is sucking.

I think my !@#$ing network card is too old, because it's giving me weird errors. I called the ISP once, and they told me to take off the splitter filter I had on the modem line, because it doesn't need it. Told me that should solve my problem. Naturally, it didn't.

By that time I was too tired and fed up to call them back, because I pretty much know what they're going to tell me, and I figured I'd totally lose it if I had to hear it.

So I went and watched the deleted scenes on Order of the Phoenix, and then randomly decided I'd watch "The Gathering" from Babylon 5.

...Londo's hair was really scary back then. I'd forgotten that, somehow.

Anyway. Mom's off in an hour, and I was really hoping I'd have this set up and all figured out by now.

I think I do have it figured out, and it's not good.

I can't find any specs on my wireless card, other than what the wireless network thingy under network connections says- "ORiNOCO mini PCI card." The driver's from 2001, and something tells me that's not good enough. So, yeah, the saga of my tech kind of sucking continues.

Argh!

Either the ISP guys didn't ask the right questions when we signed up, or we didn't ask the right questions. Whatever, I guess one of us needs to call them back and find out just how screwed we are. I figure I've been dealing with this all day, maybe I'll make Mom do it.

If we can't get this figured out I'm just going back to my crappy dialup in my room. Right now I have all my stuff in her room, on this kind of rickety old secretary desk thing, I can hardly see the screen from where I am, and in general the setup bites. Oh yeah and I'm on the main phone line- which, you know, wouldn't matter if I could get the effing DSL to work...

*headdesk*