I blog a lot with my laptop in front of the TV. I can sit there and buzz through RSS feeds and get ideas, make notes, even write posts and pre-publish them.

Gates decided he didn’t want me to so that anymore.

I spent a lot of time yesterday and all this evening checking settings, restarting, shutting completely down, unplugging from router, plugging back in router.

The little icon says I am connected to the innerwebs, but I can’t access anything. Firefox or IE. I think I will get an AOL disk and sign up for dial up. We don’t use the landlines for anything anymore.

We can’t get DSL our neighborhood, only cable. I’m not paying for two cable modems.

Bill Gates is a Prick.

I may be making a trip to Seattle.

UPDATE: Thou Shalt Not Steal Thy Neighbor’s Signal

FIVE HOURS on the phone with Netgear. Out of those five hours, only 30 minutes was waiting on hold, primarily while the good people of Bangalore huddled and tried to figure out my problem

I was deep into the bowels of Bill Gates Private Hell he calls and OS. Starting, restarting, plugging, unplugging, pinging, this IP address, that IP address, this window, that window, desktop, laptop, this person, that person, that person’s supervisor.

After literally five hours of non stop chattering, we hit the miraculous combination.

Occassionally when I couldn’t log on to my network at the speed I wanted, I would bip over and check my neighbors. It never was better, so I would bip back to mine.

The Man in Bangalore says that “sometimes this causes confusion. I would recommend you not do that.”

BTW: Netgear has a helluva service contract. I tried to get the Geek Squad and boy am I glad I didn’t. Can you imagine them spending five hours here? Never happen. Highest rating to the Netgear GearHead Support.