I Love the Internet

Over the weekend, I accessed the internet, standing up, at a slow, old computer the size of a small elephant and much prone to crashing (with what looked to be one of the earliest versions of blogger possible) and wading through things hordes of acronyms like WEP, DNS, DHCP, WPA, ISP, IP, cmd, TCP, not to mention mysterious words like ipconfig and ping. I have followed numerous esoteric (to me anyway) suggestions made by people who gave of their time to help in attempts to diagnose what was wrong with my laptop connection to the internet. Unfortunately, often the answers I got back from running diagnostics made as much sense to me as the acronyms. Less perhaps. Try Ancient Egyptian or basic Hittite.

In the end, I don’t think it was anything I did (except ask it one more time to automatically find my IP and the DNS for the network connection) that solved the problem as abruptly as it had started in the first place. Both times, the server went down (for everyone in the house) beforehand.

I guess I’ll never know what it was all about, but one thing I did have reaffirmed. There are wonderful people out there in the Web. People who will give of their time for others for no remuneration except my grateful thanks. You rock, guys.

P.S. And Khaldan – as I read your first comment, before reaching the end, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Hrugaar had suddenly acquired geek status??


Comments

I Love the Internet — 11 Comments

  1. Our Ru a geek? Surely not. Isn’t it wonderful how everyone rallied round to help you Glenda – I think internet friends are the best.

  2. I’m not entirely stupid with computers … but I am lucky enough to have a friend who is exceptionally good with them, and he was at my house at the time, so … 🙂

  3. Aaaaaah! That explains it.

    I’m like you Ru, not entirely stupid, but not entirely geekish either.

    OK, Not a bit geekish, how to you use the HTML tags on here Ru?

  4. … and not to forget that he actually did the IT support part of my job for a couple of years when I was at university.

    Back at my job today after two weeks off and I’ve almost caught up with the backlog of emails.

    But my boss is away today, so I’ve not been bothered with having to speak to him, and the support bos tell me that everything was quiet last week.

  5. I think I’ve read and seen too many conspiracy based stories… All I could think of when you said everything went down both at the beginning and the end of the outage was that it was some anonymous organisation was bugging your system and had to cover their getting in and out of the system! Paranoid much??? Not really, just a vivid imagination *grin*.

  6. Computers are very sensitive beasties. If you abuse them (verbally or physically) they react badly and sulk often.
    Use lots of positive encouragement, praise and stroking to get the best out of it.

    Well, it’s worth a try.

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