Pennie and I took a road trip yesterday to Sugarloaf for a crafts festival/street fair that was taking place. Sugarloaf is just past Warwick, NY and it was a lovely day for a drive. We took the back way over local roads and timed our arrival quite well, since traffic was just building up in the area. When we left a few hours later, parking was much worse than it was when we arrived. We had a great time, walking along the road stopping in the shops and browsing the vendor tables. Pennie got a really funky hat for herself and we picked up a lovely sweater/jacket for Amaya. On the way back we stopped at a hopping coffee shop in Warwick and picked up something to drink. On a whim, I stopped at a garden center in West Milford to buy some mums for the front steps and a pumpkin. Pennie picked out a neat one that has little “warts” all over it. All in all, it was a very enjoyable Sunday afternoon.
The evening was another story, though. At around 5 PM I thought that our neighbors were blasting music outside my office window. Actually, it was from the parish hall on the other side of the house, up the hill, and several hundred feet away. There was another one of the monthly dances/parties attended by the local Mexican population. The church really needs to get a handle on the groups that use the hall. The volume of the PA system was incredibly loud. When I went to bed at about 9:30, the volume was lower, but I could still hear it through my earplugs because the bass was thumping through the ground and resonating through every fiber of the house. Add to this that the loud family, who live between us and the church, were outside in the evening and the kids were wilder than usual, running around the house and screaming continually for an hour or more. Retirement to a farm in VA or anywhere were the neighbors are very far apart sounds really good about now.
Since last Wednesday I’ve been having issues with the AT&T connection for the laptop. I have a USB device called the Quicksilver that plugs into the laptop and lets me connect to the Internet pretty much anywhere that there’s a cellular connection. At work there is now a decent 3G signal, so it is worthwhile using the AT&T connection for daily use. The connection started having big problems at around 9 in the morning on Wednesday. I was planning on joining a Live Meeting at 11, so I poked at it a bit, until I decided that it wasn’t going to work and figured that it must be a network problem. What happened was that I’d have a connection and usually was able to browse and check email for a minute or so, but then all network activity would stop, despite having a strong signal showing. I used my office LAN to attend the Live Meeting and then called AT&T support after the meeting. The tech had me reinstall the client software, reinstall the drivers and even use the connection manager provided by the device manufacturer, but nothing worked. He decided that it was a hardware problem and a new device was shipped out. I stopped at my parents’ house, as usual, on the way home Wednesday. My sister had provided a link to some photos of her family at Disney World, so I figured I’d try to connect from my parents’ house to show them to my father, since I actually believed that the problem was not hardware, but a network issue. Sure enough, the connection was perfect.
On Thursday I had no issues at all. The replacement device arrived at home, but I figured that I’d be sending it back unused. Fast forward to Friday morning. I was unable to get a connection, it threw a generic error 635 that I had not seen before. I called AT&T again. I worked with a tech for another hour and after some further troubleshooting steps, we were able to get it working again. Unfortunately, what we did was switch devices. I was now using the replacement unit, but we had done a number of other things, too. That was, however, short lived. At about lunchtime, the connection failed again. This time the signal strength dropped to 0 bars first and when I disconnected and tried to reconnect, I was greeted with the 635 error repeatedly. I tried the other laptop and it also threw the same 635 error. Another call to tech support and more troubleshooting. Finally, the tech was able to open a network ticket because we could make a 2G connection, but never a 3G connection with the Quicksilver. I was able to make a 3G connection on my PDA phone, though. When I got home on Friday, I tried connecting and got the same error. I tried again on Saturday and Sunday, with the same results.
So, this morning I’m fully expecting to be tethering to my phone or puttering along at 2G speeds until they fix the network problem. I tried connecting anyway and was met with the 635 error on the first attempt. I switched the card to 2G only and connected. I then disconnected and switched to 3G only and it connected. It dropped a little while later, but I was able to get reconnected immediately. We’ll see how this goes or I’ll be calling AT&T again to check on the status of the network ticket. Isn’t technology fun?
Spaces, One Frontier 