I try never to call myself technically savvy, computer-literate, or other such things–the moment I do, somebody’s going to ask me to install, update, or fix something that’s beyond my scope.? Nonetheless, I do take some joy in those moments when I get electronic widgets to work in ways that they weren’t working before.? So last night I had a lovely moment of triumph when the Gilmour house network went live.? Since Mary’s in charge of setting up Micah’s new room and getting our baby’s nursery in order (we’re down to a couple names, but we haven’t settled in on one yet–we still have a month or two, right?), she let me make some changes to our home technology.
So I started looking around at some Internet options, and I decided to drop our local phone service (which had no long distance service) and DSL Internet in favor of Vonage VoIP phone and Comcast cable Internet (which was running a heck of a promotion).? So on a dollar level, we’ll be saving about forty bucks a month for a year, then twenty bucks a month after that.? Beyond that, we now have long distance on our land lines, and our Internet stream downloads podcasts via the same wireless router roughly twelve times as fast as our old DSL.
But the triumph came in connecting all the parts, logging on to the router, and doing all the workarounds that made it all click.? I’m not going to go into the details, mainly because I’d be embarrassed if anyone who actually knows computers saw how simple the job was, but for my level of expertise (that is to say, a low one), it was quite a day.? Now we can put together our new computer desk (a smaller one to fit in our bedroom since we don’t have a spare bedroom any more but one for each kid), move our desktop to its new home, and keep cranking on the Gilmour house that our new baby will come home to.
Congrats. I was without cable and internet access for four days when I tried to engineer a similar move last year.
I didn’t have that option, unless I wanted to sleep in the TV room until the problem got resolved.