Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

Is sort of what I feel like I guess.

As previously stated I setup a wireless router for my Mom.

I just finished reconfiguring the router that @ my In-Laws' place. I need to ask them if they have been losing the Internet connection or just the wireless connection.

I didn't get a chance to find that part out before I started working on it. However, I did notice that even though I was (and still am) sitting about a foot away from the router my laptop could not get onto the network.

I had to download the DLink manual, as I am completely unfamiliar with their interface and what their default passwords for the routers are.

It is possibly that I have mentioned in the past that I am a Linksys person. However, at the time that my Mother-In-Law was looking for routers I had just experienced a major problem with a Linksys router and the D-Link was on sale. So I told her that she might want to get it, the Dallas office has loved their's for years and I know a few others that sing D-Link's praises.

After messing around in their interface and what not, I am still a Linksys fan. Sure the actions you can do within the interfaces are almost identical and I might be biased due to the fact that I have years of experience using Linksys' interface. But I don't care, I like Linksys. I will always try to buy Linksys, though occasionally I think they value their name a little too much.

Well, I need to go and start up the grill and get dinner started.

Laterz.

Today, I gave my mom and David the gift of wireless internet.

For X-mas I gave my mom and David the gift of high-speed internet, via Yahoo! DSL.

Unfortunately, my mom's computer didn't have an Ethernet card. Notably, she never needed one before, the computer does have a shiny 56K modem.

However, the computer that I gave David did have an Ethernet card, as it was my old Dell, that had been hooked up to my cable modem at one point. My mom's computer however, was an HP that came as a bundle.

Moving on, on the way over to mom's we stopped at Best Buy and purchased a Linksys Wireless 54G router (with Speedbooster, LOL) and a Belking 54G usb stick wireless NIC.

Now, normally I would never, ever buy any networking gear for a home office other than Linksys. However, I really just didn't want to pay $60 for a wifi usb stick, the Belkin was $29.99. And as I have said before 'It is all made in the same plan in China anyway.'

I mean, honestly if you look at some of the high-tech gadgetry out there you will see that they have very similar form factors and that it is all just branding.

Back to the wifi adventure.

I got the wireless router online (not that it is any sort of technical achievement), I turned on the WEP security and I also rigged it so that the router does the PPPoE rather than the DSL modem. As this is the same setup that I have at the house. I didn't want my mom to have to deal the same fluke modem issues that I dealt with from time-to-time.

I will admit, in my haste to plug everything in I didn't pay attention fully and had plugged David's Ethernet cord into the WAN port and the DSL line into a regular router port. Oops!

I first got my laptop online as to make sure that everything was working as it should and to enable me to mess with the DSL modem and the router. I showed my mom how to enter in the WEP encryption key, should she need to show anybody how for next time.

After finishing up that WEP training, I installed her Belkin NIC and let her establish the internet connection (ie put in the WEP key).

She was online, high-speed style from her desktop. First time ever. She has been using David's computer for the last few months, which I am sure has been a pain.

I had thought about drop shipping her a router and a wireless NIC. But I was pretty sure that the steps necessary to get all of this running completely smoothly might be a little overwhelming.

This brings us to iGoogle, formerly known as 'Google Personalized Homepage'. I am not sure that I really like either name. I guess iGoogle is a little easier to say.

I showed my mom how to setup 'Feeds' so that she can have an easier time telling if I have updated my Blog. Notably, she picked on me for not having updated since the 21st.

After having showed her how to add a feed, she managed to show me something new (I had stepped away and wasn't watching her for a couple of minutes). She had found the 'Themes' for iGoogle. She had picked a theme that was fairly cute and also had an interesting aspect to it, because of the fact that the them has sort of a horizon look to it. They integrated the sun and moon part of the horizon to work off your local time zone, I am willing to bet that they have even worked it out so that the moon shows up according to the 'known' phases of the moon for your area.

The idea is that the sun or moon will be shown in the approx location of where they should be on the horizon for your area, cute and neat.

At this point I figured that I should see if mom wanted to blog. I know that she has enjoyed my Blog and as a whole I find Blogs to be a fairly good medium for sharing news and opinions about things.

My mom tends to be a private person. So unfortunately for all you out there that might want to read it, she has used Blogger's security features to limit the reading of the blog to invitation only.

This will likely mean only family and immediate friends. I am trying to convince her to run two blogs, one private and one public. This way she can post up her artwork and what not on the public side. I think My mom has a lot of good opinions, knowledge and art to share with the folks on the Internet.

One step at a time though, one step at a time.

She has wandered off to find some art work that she has been doing in class. So I better close out this post.

Oh yeah, I did upgrade them to Firefox 2 while I was here. I have pushed Firefox on my all of my parents. So far everyone likes it. Mostly I did it because it is a bit more virus resistant (proof) than IE.

Laterz

(I have to write up a post about the adventures in Detroit that Gina and I had the last couple of days, that will have to wait until tomorrow).

Anyone who has spent any length of time using a dial-up modem remembers their first taste of the sweet nectar called "Broadband".

I can remember downloading the original Doom shareware demo from a BBS back in Lansing, I think it was the Abacus. I had myself a 2400 baud modem. Someone had taken the time to break up the install program into about 5 or 6 chunks I think. I remember that it took me a couple of days to download it all, the Abacus only gave you so many hours a day to be connected and well the file size to download speed meant that it was going to take all of my allotted time.

But when I went to MSU I got my first taste of broadband. Not during the summer program, SUPER, they had us out in Sny-Phi (Snyder-Phillips) and older dorm, I had a 28.8 modem at this point (pretty sure it wasn't a 56k yet, I think those had just hit the market).

But when I got into the Holden dorm, I had an Ethernet outlet in my room. It was unbelievable. I could download game demos quicker than I ever imagined. That was my first real taste of broadband.

When I first moved down to Austin (TX) I was on dial-up again, with a 56k modem this time. I remember playing online games and bitching about the lag or having to download patches in the 1MB range and how long it took to do so.

Broadband for the home was still in the form of T1 and ISDN lines. Both of which were well outside my pay scale. I mean a T1 would easily be about $2k/month and a 128K ISDN line was I think like $400 or $500 dollars.

I don't remember which came first to town. But I think it was cable modem. I signed up for the RoadRunner cable modem service from Time Warner as soon as I could. It was great. It was like being back at MSU.

Not to mention it was nice to be able to be on the phone and the Internet at the same time (I didn't really use my cell phone much back then.)

I had heard horror stories about DSL. The wait times, the constant failures (for days, not hours or minutes). So I stuck with cable modem for quite a while.

I think it was around August of last year that I made the switch to Yahoo!-SBC DSL. I figured that they had to have it stable by now. Plus by bundling the DSL, Phone and Sattelite together I was spending about as much as I was for just the cable portion of my bill to TimeWarner.

So I made the switch. The DSL has proven to be fairly stable. There were some moments where I would have to reboot the modem and router. But I figured out that this was some sort of strange session conflict between my modem and router, so I made the router login to the DSL network and told the modem not to. No more problems since.

What made me think of all of this.

My Mother did.

Last night she finished hooking up her DSL modem and got her first taste of Broadband. Now, she had an Ethernet connection on her computer when she worked for the State of Michigan, but being as it was the State, not supposed to be downloading music or pictures or what not.

I congratulate my Mom on her problem solving skills. Stand up and take a bow Mom, you earned it.

The DSL modem was not working correctly it was intermittently flashing red and green. I was afraid I was going to have to call tech support, not a fun thing, AT&T (formerly SBC) outsources it to India.

However, she made the keen observation that one of the phones in the house didn't have the DSL filter attachments they provide. She installed the filter and the light when to a steady green.

She completed the registration process and was able to pull up my blog.

I ordered them the slowest speed DSL of 768 Kbps download vs what would occasionally be a 56 kbps modem connection (usually I think I connected in the 40 Kbps range). So I expect her to have at least 10 times the speed. If they really get into photo sharing or what not, it is only $5 more a month for the 1.5 Mbps speed.

Again, Mom take a bow. You were able to handle a fairly technical setup without any real help from me. And also, I think ATT-Yahoo DSL deserves a round of applause for being able to provide a decent set of instructions and a relatively pain free product.

And I am sure my Mom will always remember her first taste of Broadband. Because you will miss it when your without it.

Back to the grind, Laterz.

At least for their customer service.

I had promised my mom that I would get her some DSL for X-mas and like the neglectful son that I am (lately) I finally remembered to call AT&T this morning about it. I told the Texas rep what I wanted and he connected me to a Michigan based rep. I didn't spend a ton of time on hold, which is nice.

I told her what I wanted to do, being get DSL for my mom and pay for it. Unfortunately, they don't have their billing system setup to allow me to put the DSL on my phone bill, from the sounds of it you can do that with regular phone service. It was a little scary though, that I was able to order service on behalf of my mother without the need to provide much more than a phone number, the name on the bill and the billing address.

The Rep was kind enough to provide me with what should be the monthly charges (service + tax) for the service, so that I can write my mom a check for the year.

Anyway, I think Mom will have no problem setting up the DSL modem to work with her computer. The instructions that come with the box were pretty straight forward. We will see if AT&T-Yahoo! DSL get an A+ for their ability to write instructions.

I chuckled and smiled a bit when I was describing what I ordered for Mom. She has been on dial-up so long and never had a cable modem or DSL, so that fact that you can be on the phone and Internet at the same time was a welcome surprise.

I will be taking a trip up north sometime in the next few months, after the snow melts and before July. When I am there I will rig up a network for them so that they can both get onto the Internet at the same time. Probably go with a Linksys Wireless router but have both desktops hardwired.

It is funny, last time Gina was home her mom ordered up DSL and got a wireless router. I guess it is time for all of our parents to get broadband.

Back to the grind,
Laterz