TO-DAYS PHOTOS ARE JUST A SMATTERING OF WHATEVER I COULD FIND HERE. HAVE ALREADY MOVED THE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE TO THE RIG
We didn't get off to a good start this morning!! When I fired up the laptop it wouldn't connect & when Kelly booted up the desktop about half an hour later it wouldn't connect either. Everything had been fine when I shut the computer down last night so we knew something was up.
Two weeks ago we had received a letter informing us that our cable company, Bluewater Cable in Goderich, would be changing it's name to Eastlink because it had been bought out by another cable company in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We were not happy about that because Bluewater had been an excellent local company & a change to a larger out of Province company was going to mean not only change, but probable trouble ahead. Well, that trouble started this morning!!
THIS WAS OUR MESS TO-DAY AS WE UNPLUGGED THIS & THAT TRYING TO GET OURSELVES BACK ON-LINE AGAIN. LITTLE DID WE KNOW THAT THOUSANDS OF OTHER FOLKS WERE DOING THE SAME THING THIS MORNING!! (Click on photos to enlarge them)
Kelly phoned Bluewater's customer service first thing expecting to speak with someone in Goderich but ended up with a young techie kid in Halifax. Well, at least he spoke English & lived in North America. The kid in Halifax didn't have a clue & tried to put our computer woes on our own equipment!! The day just continued to deteriorate from there. Unbeknownst to us, the change over from the Bluewater company to the Eastlink company had begun in the night, not gone well, & the whole cable system had crashed effecting thousands & thousands of people this morning. Kelly dropped into the Goderich Bluewater office to-day & said people were lined up for 17 city blocks with baseball bats, pitchforks, 2x4's:))
We were off-line until early afternoon & when the connection was finally established we had no Outlook Express & the internet connection itself was not reacting as it should. Laptop still wouldn't connect etc. Now, if I had been here by myself I would not have had the patience or know how to trouble shoot this complicated problem. I would have had to have a techie come to the house & the kid in Halifax told us nobody was going anywhere until Friday. I think he must have been figuring on the tech driving from Halifax Nova Scotia to Bayfield Ontario or something!!!!
KELLY ON THE LAPTOP IN OUR PREVIOUS ROCKWOOD 5TH WHEEL TRAILER......2007
Well, to make a long frustrating story short.....it was our very own in house computer guru, 'Kelly the Bulldog' to the rescue. She bit into that computer problem connection mess like a gator into a big fat juicy T-bone steak. She was on the phone for half an hour with question after question for some wilting techie on the other end. After that call this afternoon I think the poor guy probably quit his job & signed up for a local basket weaving course in his own home town. I should mention here that our particular situation was compounded by the fact we have to use a router because of our two computers so we kind of had double the trouble of other folks only running one computer.......if any of that makes any sense of course.
GRABBING SOME RAYS AT PANCHO VILLA STATE PARK IN COLUMBUS, NEW MEXICO....DEC. 06
It was determined that the port numbers in our router were no longer valid with the new company & had to be changed. The cable company said that wasn't their problem & too bad about our luck!! Well, that didn't deter the Bulldog!! Kelly right away got herself on the internet to a router forum searching for more answers & solutions. She made a physical change to the back of the router with a paper clip, changed D-Links settings to default, searched for the IP address & started from scratch resetting the router. She not only got the desktop's Outlook Express back in operation again but then tackled the laptop & unscrambled it's totally confused brains as well. I won't even mention anything as to where my brains were by this time.
You know, if it wasn't for Kelly I'd probably be living under a shrub somewhere with a rotary phone & a pencil!!
GROANER'S CORNER:(( And did you know that dust is just mud with the juice squeezed out of it.
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The only thing better than right now will someday be the memories of right now....AL.
What a horror story!! I sure admire Kelly to be able to figure something like that out. Just to figure out the cables you have behind your desk you need to be a Philadelphia Lawyer. It looks the same behind my desk too :-( I guess you did not need that while getting ready to fly South.
ReplyDeleteThe snow is pretty to look at when it is on YOUR blog! Sorry about your computer woes. How do you access internet when you're traveling?
ReplyDeleteHang in there - you will soon be in the desert!
Al, you have never blogged about getting the doggy guys across the boarder. With the recent troubles of screwed down security are there any new regs for coming to the US?
ReplyDeleteThe old "hit the reset button with a paper clip trick" - I love it! Good on Kelly for figuring that out. If all computers go down, it's usually the cable. When you reconnect, and some computers can't connect, then it's likely the router needs to be reconfigured. Having Kelly there to figure that out and fix it probably saved you a whole MH tankful of gas for your trip down south next week!!
ReplyDeleteARGGGHHH how frustrating! I am sure glad you put in peaceful, relaxing, sun-soaking pics between the paragraphs of your story--- helps to relax the rest of us reading of your toils and troubles! (well, with the exception of the one SN*W pic, we could have done without that one)
ReplyDeleteAl, you go ahead and show pictures of the snow all you want. We never see that stuff down here in Benson (except for a light dusting one day each winter, and that lasts for abour two hours then melts away), and we don't want to ever see it piled on top of our motorhome. Say, would Kelly like to take a crack at our desktop before I chuck it into the dumpster? If she wants to play with it, she can have it!
ReplyDeleteGood Morning... The snow is beutiful and glad we are not in it... LOL My husband is the computer GURU in this MH... I do not have the patience to do it and would pay someone in a heartbeat to fix it... Have a fun filled day!
ReplyDeleteTravel Safe
Donna
You better get headed South.....
ReplyDeleteI want to park near you guys,,,,So you can help me do a neat Blog like yours and Kelly can fix our 3 computers, Routers, Printers, etc., etc., when they break!!:-)
Al I just want to set up next to you so we can exchange ideas about getting more out of life...I squeeze the juice out of it all the time...and it keeps getting better.
ReplyDelete