My first blog post from home!
I’m writing this from my newly set up ADSL connection. They tried to deliver the modem while I was at work Wednesday, but I was home when they came by on Thursday. Installation was just as straightforward as you’d think. The only kink was figuring out which telephone cord goes to the phone and which goes to the wall. You know, because everything inside the box was written in Japanese. I guess they’re satisfied to just have English available to place new orders. I hope I never need tech support.
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The modem is a Fujitsu all-in-one DSL modem/router unit with an expansion slot that also turns it into a wireless access point, but because I opted for the cheapest service ($21.50/month for a 12Mbps connection, how cool is that??), they didn’t give me the addon card. The fact that it’s a router is a double-edged sword, tho. Even though the unit clearly has a UPnP logo on it, it’s not responding to UPnP requests from µTorrent, which means my torrents download as though I had a way slower connection, because I can’t connect to other firewalled users. The router has an HTTP interface, but even if NTT gave me the login information for the firewall configuration, guess what language the interface is written in? I wish it was a dumb passthrough unit (and I had my beautiful LinkSys WRT54G here).
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Anyway, I’ve been trading news and blog reading for sleep for the last couple of days. (Oil is really $147 a barrel? Congrats to Claudia and Brian. Carlin will be missed. Near-beer for children, anyone? Rock Band on the Wii?? Sweet! Weezer is coming to Osaka? Super-sweeet!) Hopefully, I’ll be posting more often, now that I don’t have to leave home to do so.
Unfortunately, just before I got connected, I fed my antivirus program a bad update and it ate a bunch of Windows files (and, amazingly, their backups from the XP Pro CD copy I have on my hard drive). I still have no sound from Windows, and I’ve been struggling to make Office 2007 work, as well as any program that uses a Microsoft Management Console or snap-ins (Add/Remove Programs, Device Manager, Event Viewer, half of Windows’ built-in utilities).
But at least I can get online in my underwear. 🙂
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