Nate Beaty's Brainfag

(Sort of) Back in the DSL Gravy

posted in Home Jabber on February 18, 2005

Early in the day I spoke with a Qwest "technician" who flat-out told me my Actiontec modem was dead. He said the rapidly-blinking port lights were a sure sign that it was as useful as a puddle of horse puckey and I should (gasp!) order a new modem through them for sixty bucks. Ridiculous advice to a lifelong cheapass. I scuttled my little penny-pinching butt to the library and scoured eBay for a new modem. With 30 minutes left on the most promising auction, I ran out of time on my one hour allotted time slot, and asked one of the hard-shelled librarians if there was any flexibility on the one-internet-visit-per-day rule. Which (gasp again!) she told me there wasn't. Huh.

"Why is that? What's the use of that rule?" I asked.

Her face robotically snapped into policy explanation mode. "Because some regulars would be here all day. It'd be chaos."

This actually made sense. The library is one of four places I know of to access the internet in Astoria. Another is the aforementioned for-reals Thrift Store, Deja Vu, which has one of those only-in-a-small-town slapped on espresso "cafes" (little more than a tiny carpeted room with a counter), which has a dinosaur Pentium 130 running Windows 95, which they charge $1.50 per ten minutes to barely access the internet on. A local Lazerquik squeezes $10 an hour to use the internet. Then there's one of the most bizarre internet cafes on planet earth, the Wombat Moon Rain Forest IT thingamajig, which is NEVER open, and charges $6 an hour when you do miraculously make it inside. I was amazed to read in Keith Rosson's Avow #19 that he did a reading there. We're talking about an incredibly awkward layout of maybe 250 sq. ft, which is 90% covered with aging PCs.

Anyway! Later I changed my clothes, considered dark sunglasses, and stealthily penetrated the library internet compound only to find I'd been outbid by $.50 (gak!) -- so I hastily bid on another modem, a Westell 2200, which I was fairly sure wouldn't even work with my Qwest DSL service. When I came home, I called Qwest to find out, and was informed my old modem could actually be replaced for FREE because of a common defect in the 1520SU. Actiontec is overnight fedexing me a replacement, and a REAL Qwest tech told told me to set my NIC(s) to 10baseT speed (how many of you did I just lose?) and the modem would work until the new one arrived. Damn! Why the fuck didn't the first tech tell me this? Ugh.

So, although I couldn't figure out how to get my D-Link wireless router to slow down to the 10BaseT speed, OSX has handy advanced settings to do so with my Powerbook's internal ethernet (and "mii-tool -F 10baseT-FD" did the trick on my linux box), so I got my internet (minus wifi) going again.

Enough geek talk!

I found a $.50 basketball at Deja Vu, and Joseph and Mary and I PLAYED BALL, scaring a bunch of kids in the playground by the Catholic school up the street with our old-kid, dorkball antics. Jesus, I am so out of shape! Very fun, but I barely survived without collapsing.