infoxicated

I have had no net connection at home since Monday evening, due to a bit of a catch 22 situation that I’m sure could be solved with a little extra effort from BT’s customer support people.

Apparently I have a “stale session”, caused by constantly re-booting my PC on Monday night while I was trying to get my webcam to work. So now, not only does the webcam not work, but we have no broadband access.

The nice BT call center guy talked me through all the things I’d done before I got through to them, like powering down the modem & router. However, even with my modem switched off, it was still showing we were connected on the BT side of things. In other words, it is their problem, but one I had to solve by entering a different username into my modem’s configuration settings in order to generate a new session.

Normally we’d type http://10.0.0.2 into the address bar of our browser, and it would bring up the modem’s control panel. For some reason this is not happening any more. I don’t know why, but I have rebuilt the computer since we last had to do this, so maybe something that should be set has become unset.

Sadly, Windows 2000 is your network administrator’s operating system, not your home user’s cozy Windows XP or OSX. Thus, trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with my network configuration that is denying me access to the modem control panel is proving to be very difficult indeed.

Last throw of the dice will probably happen tonight, when I drag the modem upstairs and physically connect it to the PC via the ethernet port, removing the wireless network from the equation.

Man, I hate fucking around with the computer – it’s reliable for 355 days a year, which makes the week or so where it’s not working perfectly all the more frustrating.

Breaking News : Rumour has it that Kieran and his spanktastic laptop might be coming to the rescue. :o)

My weekend down in London had a sporting vibe about it, as it turned out. Starting with a visit to cousin Iain’s gym on Friday morning, followed by playing pool for the rest of that day in the aforementioned sports bar. The elusive Demian even put in an appearance after work, via one of those comedy “using mobile phones to find each other in a busy public place” scenarios. It was good to see him again in the flesh, albeit briefly, although due to the amount of drink I’d had by the time he showed up, we didn’t get much web developer shop-talk done. Probably a good thing, actually – Iain would have been bored stiff.

On Saturday morning we found ourselves in Shepherds Bush Walkabout watching the AFL grand final, before heading off to the QPR v Leicester City match. Sadly both games ended up a bit one sided at the end, but they were enjoyable all the same. At the football there was some nut case wearing a sombrero whom the away fans nick-named Pedro, and gave him no end of abuse while Leicester were in the lead. In fact, Pedro’s climb from despondancy into elation was good entertainment in itself, as the match swung from a two-nil Leicester lead to a 3-2 QPR victory – with all the goals happening down the other end of the pitch it was easier to see Pedro than the on field action for most of the second half.

On Saturday evening Emily cooked us a tasty dinner, and we sat in watching tv for a few hours before making our way back to Iain’s. The day out, added to the heavy day on Friday had left us both tired, so we settled for watching Match of the Day and then a game of Madden 2005, before calling it a night.