No Internet......a blessed curse....

Three days ago I called my ISP to complain about very, very, very slow web page load times. While on the phone with the tech I hit a couple of speed test sites and saw that my overall download speed was what I expected - 8-10,000kbps. I told him I would check out my end and call back if I was still having issues.

Skip to this morning.

I check email and things look like they are synched up. Then to hit some news sites and blogs and.....nothing. Looks like DNS is failing on some sites and sure enough, I can't telnet to any external DNS servers. Verify I didn't inadvertently block DNS with ISA....all good there. I decided to ping some external sites and that is when I find out nothing is visible beyond my DSL box.

That was roughly 13 hours ago.

Still no DSL. Using my WLAN card that barely gets a signal here at the house. One of the joys of living in the woods. (btw...here's a little tidbit....if the banner on this blog disappears, that is a pretty clear indication my home Internet service is offline. That is where that picture is hosted)

Ordinarily I wouldn't even be that upset about it being offline except for some work I wanted to get done that requires a rare VPN to work. I have some slides I need to put up on corpnet and some images to pull down. The latter I am not even going to consider with this aircard.

I also discovered that Sony Vegas Studio requires an Internet connection to activate. For that matter to even be usable in anything but trial mode it has to phone home. Ugh.

Finally, I was waxing nostalgic while complaining about how slow my WLAN card connection is. It is still many, many times faster than my first modem - a 300 baud AppleCat. Faster than my Hayes 300/1200. Faster than any one of several 2400's. Faster than my USR 9600 HST. After that there were probably a dozen 14.4-28.8-56k of varying makes and models before I made the jump to ISDN. Now we are up to a speed that compares to how bad the WLAN card is here at my house. Ugh.

I guess the absolute worse was discovering that since the DSL is out, I can't connect to XBox Live.

No Guitar Hero challenges tonight....

Cheers.....