Felix 2, Time Warner 1, Sprint 0, Linksys 0

That’s right. It’s the triumph of this nerd. Despite Time Warner’s and Sprint’s best efforts I have internet access again through a device that isn’t my iPhone (not to belittle that li’l guy). I woke up today to discover that I still had no cable service (TV or internet). Lovin’ Road Runner more and more.

So I decided to take my fate into my own hands. The problem as outlined yesterday was that my brand spankin’ new Sierra Wireless Aircard 595U came with a CD for windows and a url for Mac installs. Well, since I need to, you know, have connectivity before I can visit that URL that doesn’t really help me too much. And my little laptop doesn’t have a CD reader, so there was a quandry.

Frustration being the mother of all invention, I hit on this fantastic rube goldberg plan. Over my internal LAN (a wireless Linksys router) I would copy the .exe file from my mac to my pc. Then I’d install and activate the evdo card on my pc and download what needed to be downloaded from the internet. Then, I’d copy that back to my mac and install it and that should work. I was stymied initially by Linksys which refused for some reason to let my pc connect over the air. So, undaunted I connected using a wire (gasp!) and that seemed to work.

Then everything pretty much went as planned, downloaded the mac installer zip and sftp’d it to my mac. Installed it and now I’m happily blogging away from my mac. I’m pretty excited for the ol’ evdo card which will greatly lessen the pain I feel when Time Warner decides to screw me again.

Just heard from Time Warner, apparently my outage was fixed about 15 minutes ago. They didn’t tell my apartment because I’m still completely out, but it’s lunch time and maybe it’ll take some time for everything to get back to normal. I’m still amazed at Time Warner’s complete lack of interest in upselling me better service - the $60/mo I’m now paying sprint could easily have been more to Time Warner. Whatever, at least now I’ve got my all my eggs in two baskets.

UPDATE: Well, it wasn’t fixed a few hours later, I called in again and they said that everything should be fine and they needed to send a tech over. My protestations that it was suspicious that there was a huge outage (over 24 hours) just before and perhaps all was not as as well as they thought it was fell on deaf ears. An appointment was made for mid week. Fortunately, several hours after that, they seem to have realized that it wasn’t just me and fixed the problem. So I’m back online with Road Runner. Yay. The good news is that my EVDO card is kick butt now that it is up and operational. It isn’t the fastest - I suspect that because my apartment’s window faces into, basically, a shaft, my connectivity isn’t as good as it could be. Still ~500/kbs down and ~200/kbs up is good enough for a temporary measure.

Aug 12th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: navel gazing