Just Because it Goes in the Dumper . . .

Remember how I gloried about our vastly improved internet service?

Well . . . I might have been a bit premature.Because the good ol’ net is up to its old tricks again.

I’m going to try a few things this weekend – looking at router settings, testing to see if we have a wifi weak spot in the study, etc. The latter is where my money is – although the craft room is right next to the study and NEVER seems to have any wifi problems. Then again, the study is nested underneath furnace ducts whereas the craft room has a straighter shot to the router upstairs.

So maybe a wifi extender. Or we just nuke it from orbit to be sure.

The nuclear option might also include having Cable One pay us a visit, now that the house has been “re-wired.”

In any case, if Freddy deCordova were here, he’d disavow himself of the whole situation too.

"Can’t Make A Move Without A Form"

I feel a bit like Tuttle this week.

Over the weekend, filled out our federal taxes. After three rejections and fixes (mostly for minor issues) I got the taxes submitted, with a refund on the way.

I know – celebrating I’m getting a little bit of my money back, even though less than we’d hoped, as one of our kids has aged out of the dependent tax deduction even though he’s still living with us and costing us plenty.

Also got us within one step of having same said child’s application to Brigham Young University-Idaho completed (more on that later).

Also, revised a FAFSA form, already submitted, now that FAFSA and the IRS’ websites agreed to talk to each other, though our home internet service, which still wants to randomly crap out on my computer* tried to throw another snake into the works.

Also started same child on a scholarship application which, if all goes well, could be submitted this evening if all the paperwork has come in. Mercifully, this one has had a lot less paperwork than anything else we’ve done in recent memory.

Then today, got the state taxes ready to go – another refund, much smaller this time around – and got the BYU-I application sorted out. I don’t know if my call got them to ferret the last of the dual enrollment transcripts out of the file pile or if it had just coincidentally arrived this morning, but the button is now READY TO BE PUSHED. That should happen once said child is out of school, or I get home.

There are other applications to sort out, of course. Not looking forward to them. Because paperwork, it’ll kill ya. Tuttle knows.

And this is outside the regular paper-pushing I do at my full-time job. And at my part-time job, ho help me.

*The home internet, while working wildly better than it has in the past, is still a bit hinky. But less so.

We Get to Drink from the (Almost) FIREHOSE!

So last summer, while the family was at camp, our Internet crapped out. I couldn’t connect at all and it was getting frustrating not only trying to update this fabulous blog but also get into the class I was teaching. You know, the paying gig.

Riveting stuff, I know. But it gets better.

Cable One sent out a technician and he poked around for a while at their outside box (a long while, but more on that later) and then poked around inside for a while. He asked if we had any other cable connections in the house. I showed him, and he was not impressed.

He did manage to get us connected again, but in talking with their tech support afterward (they called to follow-up on the visit) the guy said something classic:

“Looks like you might have something wrong with your wires.”

He meant the wires in our home, and suggested we contact an electrician to have at least one new connection put in so we’d have a better overall internet experience.

I chalked it up to the typical “We don’t know what’s wrong, so let’s blame the wires” talk and did nothing about it apart from look at the costs of CAT-6 cable at Home Depot.

So you know where this is going.

This weekend, in a fit of frustration trying to connect with the FAFSA website (don’t get me started) I decided I’d had enough. I grabbed the new cable we had just purchased that weekend and marched outside to the famed box on the side of the house. I remembered clearly the guy on the phone saying “When you get your house re-wired, call us and we’ll come out and get you hooked up.” So I was hopeful but not optimistic when I opened the box – to find one simple screw-in connection and a ground wire. I think I might be able to stave off a service call, I thought. I connected the wire to the box. Then strung it through the garage, through the back door of the house and to our wireless router.*

After a few sparks and a quick whiff of ozone, GLORY BE we had an internet connection that stretched for miles. Relatively. But you get the idea. We could have MULTIPLE devices connected at the SAME TIME.

I’m still wrassling with FAFSA (again, don’t get me started) but everything else has been wonderful. We were able to watch the Super Bowl this weekend, streaming it, with only a few temporary glitches.

So the question from my wife came up: Why did you wait until now to fix this, when you knew what the fix was this summer?

Answer: I’m a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess.

This isn’t to say our connection is perfect – we still see a slowdown in the evening when lots of people are using the net – but it’s nothing like the slowdown we’d seen for months.

We’re drinking from the fire hose, folks, and it feels great. Should have found that marble in the oatmeal a long time ago.

*Naturally, once I saw the improved connection I installed the new cable properly, even digging through the insulation in the wall to get the cable to come out the proper box in the kitchen. While my wife is a patient woman and put up with lousy internet access for months, she would NOT put up with a cable snaking in through the back door for more than the necessary time to test the new connection.

Shooting at Wamp Rats

We might, after two weeks of frustration, have a fully functional battle station internet connection.

Teresa Aiekle, a local plant representative for Century Link, spent a good portion of her afternoon tinkering with things outside our house Wednesday afternoon and fixed a few things that might have been making our connection go crazy. Here’s what my wife reports:

We have a new “port” on our house, which I suspect is smaller than a wamp rat has something to do with connecting the phone line to the house.

We have a new, fancy DSL filter on the line connecting the modem to the world, so that’s fun.

Teresa also disconnected a random phone line that went from the junction box in the back of the house to who knows where on our property, which is where some of the DSL signal might have been going but maybe it was a neighbor’s phone line or something or a poorly-conceived attempt by someone in the neighborhood to steal cable.

All I know is as of now the crackle that was in our phone line is gone, and, hopefully, the Internet will be fully functional tonight. I plan to conduct some stress testing by finally logging in to my Origin account to play more than ten minutes’ worth of Sim City before the connection drops, which is what has been happening over the past few weeks. Unless, of course, this happens. I am dealing with EA, after all.


UPDATE: It appears if I hard-wire a connection, the internet stabilizes. Wi-Fi connection is still bad. Can't be our Wi-Fi cards, because they all worked fine up until a few weeks ago. To have three fail almost simultaneously and in the same way seems too much of a coincidence.

Speed Connect Update

Time to give credit where credit is due.

After I posted a rather impatient post on Speed Connect's Facebook page about the poor quality of our Internet service as of late, we got some action.

First of all, we got a call from their local representative a little nonplussed about the Facebook posting -- evidently, she'd gotten a call about it and was told to act on it immediately. She said she'd send a tech out, but at tht time the Internet was working adequately. Later on in the day, howwever, it wasn't so my wife called her back. That got us a week's refund and a promise that a technician would come out Monday to see what was going on.

The tech did arrive Monday and discovered that our antenna, in seeking a strong signal from Speed Connect, was connecting to a tower much further away than the closest one to us, thus giving us a weaker signal. He talked ot hte antenna and now has it connecting to the proper tower. I suspect all of this was due to the company's work on "upgrading" things locally, leaving the closwer tower out of commission long enough for our antenna to lock onto the more distant one.

Jake -- BridgeMaxx' sole technician -- fixed us up right, so kudos to Speed Connect on getting things fixed quickly. Jake tells us the company is investing a lot more in the sytem's backbone, meaning outages and poor signals should be a thing of the past. Hoping all that work doesn't translate into higher costs for us. We've been promised that our current contract will be grandfathered in, but all bets are off for when that contract is up and, well, business happens.

Still, five of five stars for Speed Connect getting things working again, lest ye think I only post about them to complain.

Prayer to the Idaho Internet Gods

I got this e-mail from my friend Alan in Utah late last night:

OH IDAHO INTERNET GOD!

WE PRAY THEE TO

WATCH OVER OUR UPLOADS

AND TO HELP US

WATCH VIDEO AT THE

VERY LEAST IN SLOW MOTION

PLEASE BE KIND TO US

IN THIS OUR HOUR OF NEED

He says this only half in jest, as there have been many times when our good ol' "Idaho Internet" has made Skype calls and photo transfers and even simple e-mails a rather difficult thing to accomplish. That has been so thusfar this weekend, with the Internet basically pooping out on us last night and the night this morning and even part of my knee.*

So last night I did the stupid, standard things I have to do to try to ensure the problem isn't on our end. That involves the industry standard of unplugging everything, waiting a few minutes, then plugging everything back in again. Didn't work. So then I ran virus scanners on both computers, found problems on both, cleaned them up, then tried again. No luck, except for now, obviously. I think, given that the service pooped out at night and at about the same time each night, that they're doing some kind of work on the network locally. Or all those schlubs at BYU-Idaho are streaming their Netflix and hogging all the bandwidth.

But now everything is working again. Not sure if they network fixing is done, if the students have stopped the streaming, or if the prayer to the Idaho Internet gods worked. I'm putting my money on the prayer, actually.

*"As the Stomach Turns," episode I'm not sure. You have to watch BOTH PARTS.