The Law Of Averages
12/12/1

You�d think that on the day that I got the cable modem, yesterday, that I�d have put up an entry. Well, thing didn�t go according to plan. And that�s an understatement.

You know, not that I have a choice, but sometimes I wish that the peaks and valleys, the ups and downs that I have in my life would be actual peaks and valleys. I dunno, it does sound a little odd to say I�d like a week down and then a week up, rather than the spikes of hours or even minutes that I have now. Watch me jinx myself and I�ll have a lousy next month.

Yesterday, the alarm goes off for Aisai at six and she gets up. I try to stay as asleep as I can while she gets ready and when my alarm goes off at seven, I stay in bed. I really plan on getting up and getting ready for the cable modem installers before 8, but my motivation to get ready for them any earlier keeps me from getting up.

That is, until 7:48. I got up, I took a shower, put in contacts, did all my morning stuff. I got fully dressed in black jeans, a navy colored shirt, and my suede shoes, and lay back down on the bed.

The cats collected around me and we all took a catnap until nine.

Aisai called and when I had actually gotten up, I ate some cereal.

I�d been warned that the installers wouldn�t come until three days after they said they would show up. I played some Grand Turismo 3 and when 10:15 rolled around, I called Knology.

The gal the week before, when I ordered the cable modem, said that they�d be here between eight and ten. I called to �make sure I wrote down the right day� and sure enough I did. They told me if they were much later to call and they�d get me a dispatcher to tell me the status of my installation.

Well, I didn�t need to since they showed up right after I called. Later, I mentioned to Installer A, that the lady on the phone said they�d be there between eight and ten. He pointed at his work order and told me that he was just told AM. Works for me.

So, what about those ups and downs. I considered them showing up a big up. Then, when he looked at the area where I wanted the cable popping out, he said that if he could move it to the left two feet that he could keep me from paying the $30 fee for him running a line. So we did that. Another up.

Then, after they had installed the new cable itself, coming directly from the box on the side of the house so there is no drop in the signal due to splitting the cable, he asked for my Windows98 installation disc. I told him that I didn�t have one that my brother-in-law upgraded my operating system the last time I got a new hard drive.

In fact, and I didn�t tell him this, I gave away my Windows95 discs. Yes, plural, they were on 3.5 disks.

He said he couldn�t do anything without the drivers on that disk. And that he wouldn�t be able to leave the cable modem unless it was a real, full installation. A big down.

I called Tom, but since he is a night worker, he was sleeping and not answering the phone. I called Aisai and she said she�d see if she could locate one.

I hung out with the guys and we talked about stuff. They went down to their van and then Aisai found one at her work. I went outside and asked them if it was OK if I had a Win98 install CD here in 20 minutes. They said that would be great. I told Aisai, who was on hold, to �Bring it.� A big up.

Aisai got there pretty quickly. Installer A and Installer B and I talked about cars and dogs while we waited. Installer A was miffed since he had to do an install at four in the afternoon, and that meant working into the night.

They loaded the drivers and it didn�t work. Another down. They tried and tried. The modem was detecting signal but the computer wasn�t getting anything.

I�ve left out how buggy my computer is. Sometimes it will not boot up, it�ll just beep at you and you have to hit the reset button. If it beeps again, hit the reset button again. Eventually, it won�t beep and it�ll boot. The first time this happened while they were there, it took about 20 resets. The other times it took maybe 8 and then only one each for the next two. It also has other problems.

One of these was that when there was a half install of the cable modem, the computer decided that it had lost some vdx extension file. I don�t think it ever had it. So, that was displayed, on a black screen during boot-up, any time they rebooted.

Finally, Installer A called and found out that the lady had typed in the number of something wrong and as soon as she changed it, the cable modem worked. Big big up.

So, they left and it turns out I didn�t have to pay anything at all for the install. Whoo hoo. Another big up.

So, I go upstairs and, to show off my bandwidth, I try to stream CD101, an alternative station that broadcasts over the internet from Ohio. It didn�t work. I then tried going to beta lounge, and I found out that I didn�t have realplayer or a even fairly recent Windows Media Player and also no QuickTime.

Before I started installing stuff wildly, I did a regclean. And sure enough, there was stuff for it to fix.

I installed RealOne player, which didn�t install correctly and didn�t work. I uninstalled it.

I went to housecall.antivirus.com and found out I had no virii on my machine. And then I went to Microsoft Windows Update.

At work, I use this on a regular basis. In IE, I go to tools, then the update thing. Sometimes there�s a �critical update� and sometimes there isn�t. There was for the home computer and I also had it put Media Player 7.1 on my machine.

It downloaded them and installed them, but to finish the install, it had to reboot. It rebooted wrong. Now, anytime I try to start up the machine it tells me that Explorer has caused an error and must be shut down. There are two options, close or details. The details make no sense to me, and you have to hit close eventually.

Then you have a mouse on a background and that�s it. No icons, no nothing. If you do a ctrl-alt-del you get the task manager thing and you can shut down, but there is nothing to end task on, since nothing is running. It shuts down.

I have a shut down machine. That�s all it can do. Big big down.

I�ll be taking it to Datac tomorrow and they�ll do their thing at $60 an hour. I�ll also have them resolve that hardware conflict that keeps me from having my CD and my CD burner plugged in, and figure out why it beeps rather than boots at times. When I mentioned just the Explorer thing, he said that it might take two hours. I told him that I didn�t mind losing everything since I�d been backing things up on CD. He said that was a good thing.

And all this time, the cable modem is sitting up there with the little green light lit at the bottom of all the lights it has, the one that means �Hey, I�m connected to the internet.�

I figure I�ll have internet at home again by next Tuesday.