I’m back online! We’ve been settling into the new house over the last two weeks. Almost everything is unpacked and put away, although there’s lots of little stuff left to do like hang up pictures, organize books, finisih setting up the home theatre, and so on. I’ve mowed the lawn twice now, thereby tripling my lifetime number of lawns mowed, and it hasn’t been as much of a chore as I thought it would be.
Today, I finally was able to connect via Verizon DSL. Supposedly it was going to be activated last Friday but I got an automated call that installation was delayed until this Wednesday. That didn’t stop another e-mail and an automated call from James Earle Jones on Friday welcoming me to my newly activated account. You’d think those systems could be automated or something. Unfortunately, there’s something weird about the phone wiring inside the house. Although, DSL is in theory coursing through all the phone jacks, the modem only finds a connection when hooked up to an amateurish looking phone jack in the basement labelled DSL. The previous owners did the work of running Cat5 cable up from their to the 3rd floor.
To end on a geeky note, Verizon now offers a free integrated dsl modem + router + wireless network and it didn’t not nearly suck as much as I feared. Actually, that was a little harsh. I should say I was pleasantly surprised by how configurable it was and it looks like it has a pretty decent firewall built in, but the bar wasn’t too hight. I haven’t used it enough to judge day to day performance, connection dropping and the rest. Still, I’m paranoid that it’s secretly logging my traffic and sending it to Verizon.