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Club Josh / Technology

The DSL Chronicles

So Saturday Roger notices that our lovely Earthlink DSL isn’t working. We have had spotty problems since it was first installed last October, but overall have been satisfied with the service. After a full day of no DSL, I finally called tech support around 1am Sunday. The helpful technician instructed me to uninstall all my communications software and then re-install it. Still no luck. Finally he opened a tag and said a rep would contact me, and hopefully it would resolve itself over the weekend. Sunday morning at 10am, an Earthlink tech person called and said that Pac Bell has given me the boot. Apparently, they received a disconnect order from Earthlink and shut me off the service. The guy told me to call first thing Monday morning so they could get on the phone with Pac Bell at the same time. (I guess this means that no one at Pac Bell is working other than the gleeful technicians Larry, Curly, and Moe who are unplugging helpless consumers.) So this morning bright and early, I call Earthlink. I wait on hold for total of 1 and a half hours and speak to several different people. Finally, Jannette tells me that she is getting the runaround from Pac Bell as well and will call me back later. So finally I get the call back. Pac Bell has completely disconnected me from DSL. Which of course means I need to go back to the beginning of the queue line to get DSL back. The short of it? I am sans DSL for up to a month and a half. For my trouble I get a free dial up account (don’t I have this already?) and two free months of DSL when it gets connected again. Roger thinks I should have pressed for more and he’s probably right. But after a total of three and a half hours on the phone for the last few days, I didn’t have any fight left. I’ll keep you updated as the chapters unfold.

Last night, it finally occurred to me what in tarnation I was doing for New Years 1995-1996. I was at Universal CityWalk with Nick watching Casey Kasem count down to midnight. Oh yes, and we spent a lovely hour trying to get out of the poorly designed parking garages.

Also last night I was thinking of a new design for the Gorn pages. If I ever get the free time I want to scan all of the old Gorn photos that never made it as well as clean up some of the older ones on the site. It’s an interesting idea and since I have no DSL at home, I might have the time to do it (just no way to upload the photos in a reasonable time). I also have some Disneyland Paris photos I never scanned that I’d like to post as well. time to dust off and fire up the scanner.

Oh yes, and finally (are you still there?) Epinions finally deleted my account. I lost 3 bucks of E-royalties by canceling it, but considering no one could access any of my reviews anymore in the travel section I don’t think I would ever reach the $10 minimum to cash out.