Technology hell.
This has been the weekend from hell. On Thursday we lost our Internet access and I spent close to 3 hours on the phone with various Sympatico people trying to diagnose the problem. I can’t keep a connection to their service. Their conclusion is that suddenly all three of our phone jacks have “gone bad”. How this happens is a mystery to me, but whatever. So then I have to call Bell and schedule a repair person to come who’ll show up between 8AM and 4PM on Thursday.
So because I work on call and have to connect to work from home, I grabbed the cheapest package Rogers has for the Internet. It works, but it’s about 15 kilobytes per second in each direction. It’s fine if I’m not using BitTorrent on it (which Rogers fucking throttles anyways).
Now in the midst of plugging in the new cable modem my router, a Linksys WRT54G pre-VXWare fiasco, fries. As in suddenly it resets and when it comes back none of the network interfaces on it work anymore. So I factory restore it, change the firmware, and so on and nothing. It responds just fine on the wireless LAN but will transmit no data on it’s wired jacks.
Pissed off, I go and replace the stupid router and get a new power bar with a surge protector for the cable line and the phone line, on the off chance that the power is fucked up enough to damage equipment.
To add to the whole mess I went into work on Saturday morning to upgrade our firewall there (since it’s pretty much the one thing I can’t do remotely) and it should have been seamless. It was almost seamless, except post-upgrade it wouldn’t accept any more inbound VPN connections due to a bug in the configuration update system. A bug that their engineers confirmed, yet no one else has had before. Luckily rolling back the firmware and restoring was no big deal.
And to top everything off, over the last couple weeks my Xbox 360 has been sounding more and more like a goddamned jet engine spooling up in our living room, getting so loud that I have to keep increasing the volume on the games to drown it out. Well I don’t have to worry about that anymore, since now it won’t read discs! I’ve called and they’re replacing it and sending a box this week. For anyone keeping score this is the second time since January that a 360 has croaked on me.
So yeah, the last few days have been last than fun.