I connected to Cable all.by.myself

People, I have just about entered the 21st century. I am only 10 years late.

I still do not have a landline courtesy of my friends at Failstra, however this evening I crawled behind the TV to connect up a cable modem to my Foxtel point and I am now WIRELESS. What a revelation it is to sit with (my work) laptop on knee and iPhone in hand both connected to the ether.

Methinks perhaps 5 connections at one time will not be enough in this household. On our recent holiday we had 10 adults, 5 children and 23 devices connected to the wireless router at our accommodation. Think about it - we all had a laptop, a smartphone, there were 3 iPads and a couple of the kids had iTouches. Soon everything will have a wireless component and our household wireless demands will be huge.

My sturdy desktop, however, is not yet wireless. The 24 hour Failstra connection guru tells me that I need some sort of adapter for my 3yo outmoded technology ("desktops...do they still exist?"). I find it somewhat amusing that my wireless adapter will be coming via snail mail and not arriving in the fireplace in a puff of green smoke.

And while we are talking wireless, when are we going to be able to do away with the twenty cables that connect our TV to all the bits and bobs? Surely that's the next BIG IMPROVEMENT.

Catastrophic Hard Drive Failure

It's only been a week but it's felt like a year.

Last week the hard drive on my aged laptop suffered a catastrophic failure. Died. Kaput. While I do back up to an external drive it may have been a while since I did that. Oh dear.

So I have spent a week completely away from the cyber world. It was sort of weird. I used the paper version of the yellow pages a lot, I RANG people, I talked to people FACE TO FACE, on purpose. Actually, it was quite refreshing. I even bought a computer the old fashioned way.

I had been putting off buying a new computer because I just couldn't be bothered with all the research. Yet faced with an urgent need it was surprisingly easy. I rang Dell, ordered a box.with.the.lot on Friday afternoon and it was built in the US and delivered to my door this morning. Voila. All done.

If only I had done this a week earlier and I wouldn't be faced with the loss of my entire contact database and three months worth of photos.