Friday

Hi. I'm finally posting this from our house, and this seems as good a day as any to restart normal operations here. Building maintenance finally came upstairs and installed our long-awaited DSL connection Wednesday afternoon, but it didn't work even ten minutes later. This was a matter of ironing out the service, I've come to understand. At the time, however, there seemed to be some discrepancy between the paper contract, on which I'd stipulated a user name and password, and the default sign-in space at the ISP, which asked for user name and two passwords. Wednesday evening and Thursday I tried to express to the front desk that I knew what my password was supposed to be, but the log-on was impossible due to this simple inconsistency: I had two things when three seemed to be required. I tried many combinations of the data I knew, but nothing worked. It turns out this was not the issue at all. That log-in screen wasn't supposed to be there, the internet was supposed to just magically begin working. Yesterday afternoon, I finally got someone to come up here, access some administrative function of the ISP's default page, and make that screen go away with an admin-level passcode. Then I spent most of the night play-testing the world wide web, and so far my service remains consistent today. So I can now type and post this at my desk. I can now reply to emails. What I cannot seem to do is make the DSL network agree to communicate with the proxy ISP of my wireless router; it tells me, over my connection, that I have no connection. I am tied to the wall of my office by a cat-5 cable. This does not bode well for Sunshine's internet access, huh? [Cavin]