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Christi Diggs
on May 23 2013 - 06:00 AM
A drop of spin, a cup of deception and tsp. politics=Apathy
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Lindsay Metcalf
on May 22 2013 - 06:00 AM
When that tornado siren sounds, I'm in the basement
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mara williams
on May 21 2013 - 06:00 AM
Summer break has this mom on a house upkeep war path.
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Don't worry, I fixed it.
So, I was sitting here on our couch this past Saturday, waiting for Marc to come home. His dad was bringing him back after a fun filled week in Florida (lucky!). I had my laptop on my lap, passing some time on the good ol' internets, when I noticed in my Finder window that there were a couple of other users on our unsecured wifi.
I set our wifi up without a password a long time ago. I didn't really take internet security too seriously back then. But I learned recently that this can make your internet slower.
"How do you set up a password on our wifi?" I asked my husband. He told me to absolutely not do it. He had tried in the past and it was so confusing, he spent a stressed out hour on the phone with the people that made the router and still didn't have a password set up.
"But it's making our internet slower," I said. "And can't people steal your identity or whatever?"
"Oh," he said. "Well, you can try if you want."
So, I did. I'm pretty tech-savvy, you know. I looked it up and learned how to set up a password. I got to the proper screen and put in our new code, and then the router restarted itself.
What? What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks did I just do?
Also, that is what my husband would have liked to know as his game, his online role playing game, stopped. Suddenly. In the middle of killing... something. It's what my daughter would have liked to have known as the show she was watching on Netflix stopped. Suddenly. In the middle of Care Bears singing.
"It's okay," I said. "It's okay. It'll restart, and I'll put in the password." No one was happy. The router restarted, and the password didn't work. The password didn't work!
I fiddled with it for a while, I connected to the internet directly so I could Google my problem, I screamed and cussed, to no avail. Finally, I contacted Motorola's customer service. Surely they could solve the problem. It's theirs, after all.
"We are sorry," was the message I got. "This particular device has been discontinued and is no longer being serviced by Motorola."
Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you. Our router's ten years old.
So, we waited for Marc to come home without internet access. Mitch had to find something else to do besides kill things with lightsabers. Charlotte had to rediscover her Legos. I had to read a book. A book! In real life! And I couldn't post status updates about what I was reading, either.
It was torture!
Finally, Marc's dad showed up and dropped Marc off. "What?" he said when I told him our troubles. "No Netflix?" We threw everyone in the van and headed out to Best Buy so we could drop fifty bucks on a new router.
So there we were with our new router! It was certainly and upgrade. Videos loaded faster, as did the many different tabs I usually have on my browser. Netflix worked like it was supposed to. And then my phone rang. It was our neighbor, Jenny.
"Hey, this 'mitcholm' connection, is that you guys?" she asked. She wanted to know if she could have our password to get on the internet at her house. Of course she could, I said. She's one of my besties! "I had been connecting on 'motorola', but it's not there anymore."
Okay. Well, I guess I broke the internet because I was trying to keep people from using our internet, and when I fixed it I let the same people use it who were using it before. And spent fifty bucks. Sigh.
On the bright side, our connection is much better! And, I have to admit, it was nice to disconnect for a while. I had no idea how much our family depended on the internet. We sure are glad to have it back!
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