When I got up yesterday morning, I switched on the router, all plugged in and ready to go, to check for any sign of life. Lo and behold, the DSL light went green for the first time since leaving the Vicarage three weeks ago. All the laptops in the house work with it - still using the old modem from the Vicarage account, rather than installing the newer, posher one, plenty of time for that later, when all the pictures are up.
It's been a long wait, and it's such a relief to be able to switch on and find things out, having become so dependent on that level of domestic convenience. What a remarkable change in the way we run our lives over the past fifteen years!
I've had to buy a wireless adaptor to allow my desktop computer tucked away upstairs in the back room now, to talk to the router downstairs, next to the main 'phone. I was thrilled to discover that when I attached the Netgear USB adaptor and booted up Linux, it was recognised automatically and worked immediately.
Four years ago, I bought the same kind of adaptor to use with a wireless broadband setup and getting it to play properly with Linux was tricky and frustrating, teaching me much about the limits to my skills. Linux has developed such a lot in the past two years that now it's more hassle to install the same USB adaptor on a Windows system, involving running an installation disk, and the procedure takes all of five minutes instead of a second or two. That's what I call progress.
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