February 27, 2005

A Wired Weekend

Normal blogging will resume Monday. I've spent much of this weekend dealing with all sorts of wires and wireless gizmos. We recently dumped Comcast as our TV and Internet provider and MCI as our phone service and went with Bellsouth, BellSouth DSL and DirecTV. Add to it a new DVD player for the playroom, and a TV that's so old it doesn't accept the standard three-plug RCA jacks, requiring me to install an RF modulator and then properly integrate the DirecTV box, the DVD player, the VCR and the TV - argh.

Then it was on to the home office to unplug the Comcast modem and install and configure the DSL modem - and then add a wi-fi router to it so I can use my new Dell Inspiron 700M laptop anywhere in and around my house. That only required 90 minutes on tech support with a nice lady in India working for Cisco's Linksys division. (In case you're curious, I enabled the security function on my wi-fi network, so you can't surf the 'net on my wi-fi. Some of my neighbors, it seems, haven't done that.)

End result: I've got more shopping channels that I ever knew existed, and I'm blogging unplugged and loving it, and looking forward to warmer weather so I can work or blog on my back patio.

Not bad for a total non-techie.