Welcome to Technology HELL!

November 5, 2008

And I’m not kidding, either. Arrrrrgggghhhhhh!!! OK, this is the road I took to get here:

1. My mom decided to move (I had my “Chicken Coop” in her duplex since I didn’t have broadband out where I live)
2. I heard about a local ISP who just put up a wireless tower about 5 miles from me so I decided to move The Coop back home. Hey, real high-speed internet that I could use for home AND work! No more sucky dialup!!
3. Wave Computers, my new ISP, tested my home for access (this is where the road starts getting really twisted) and decided I needed a 9 foot rigid pole mounted above my roof to put the wireless antenna on. I live in a valley and in order to get a consistent connection, my antenna needs to be taller than the trees around me.
4. Twist #2: I had to wait for the stuff (heavy duty cable, rigid pole) to come in before they could do the installation. That cost me a week of work.
5. Twist #3: Sprint vs Cogent – If you haven’t kept up (and why would you if your broadband isn’t provded by either of these guys), you wouldn’t know that Sprint severed the technology road to Cogent websites due to a disagreement about the current peering agreement. In my case, that meant that my new broadband (provided by Sprint) didn’t work on any of my client websites (yep, you guessed it – my webhost, Readyhosting, uses broadband provided by Cogent) so I couldn’t even access them to do any maintenance at all! I ended up having to install a VPN (Hotspot Shield) between me and the ‘net to be able to access my bread and butter…UPDATE: The two broadband providers have reached a  truce. Whether or not it’s permanent is anybody’s guess. My ISP is in the process of setting up the primary wireless tower to accomodate broadband from Qwest, so it won’t be an issue if they start duking it out again…but that won’t happen until Friday….another week gone with the wind…..
6. Twist #4: Gmail quit working. I don’t know why. I don’t know if the new wireless drops too many packets (still monitoring this installation) or what but I can reply to one message, then I get the dreaded “Still Working” and the connection ends up timing out. That really sucks because I’ve been using Gmail exclusively for all my business e-mail since I have multiple addresses I need to check and I can check ‘em all in Gmail. SO…I had to start using my primary domain (2smartchix.com) webmail and have all my Gmail forwarded.
7. Twist #5: You bet this road is getting hard to travel! For some reason, I can’t FTP files bigger than 4 kb and sometimes, I can’t even complete an upload for files that small. Don’t ask me why. Is it my wireless? Oh, yeah, since my tekkie guys, Zach and Josh, are preparing the main tower for Qwest, they’ve got one circuit closed down so that reduces performance BIG TIME. Could that be why FTP stops working? Who knows? Not me….

Oh, did I mention that I had a new client who launched her Wordpress site in the middle of all this? We were able to pull it off with a lot of hand-wringing and sweating on her part and a lot of handholding and lost hair on my part. It turned out beautifully, however. Check it out at Women’s Outdoor News!

So, you can understand why I say I’ve been living in Technology Hell for the past month. As Rosanne Rosanna Danna would say……..

It’s always somethin’

Posted in Views From The Coop