Internet Down :(

Right now my internet is down.

Yes, I'm blogging and my internet is down. And the sad news is because it's a phone company problem it'll probably be down for days.

My DSL modem dropped off the internet at about 6PM EST. This also means my home phone is down because I have it set up as a Voice Over IP connection. That, as you can tell, didn't keep me off the internet. Not even for a heartbeat.  As I determined that the trouble was the DSL line. (the outside line, beyond the DSL modem in my basement) I grabbed my cell phone and looked up their number in the built-in web browser, and called my ISP. As I waited on hold I switched it to the Facebook app to tell my friends that our planned movie night was off as I had no Netflix if I had no internet. Truth is I already knew how I could set up Netflix, and I may at some point this weekend if we're really bored, but it would not have be very enjoyable at the time with the on-hold music playing over the phone.

Having sent the message to my friends I continued to wait on hold, with the cell phone plugged into a charger to keep it from dying before I got through to a live body. Once I did get through to Mark at Tech Savvy (Thanks for taking me seriously Mark, the first person I spoke to wasn't willing to help me until I turned the computer off and on again. Seriously, that was what she asked me to do, and refused to help me because I insisted that the computer was not the problem as I could clearly see that the modem's DSL interface did not have sync... I didn't catch her name, did you guys hire Jen from IT Crowd?) ...anyway, once I got through to Mark and explained the situation, stepped through some troubleshooting of connecting a phone to the dry loop only to hear a bunch of static. (sounds like water in the line, it is raining out. I'm guessing a squirrel chewed the drop) We then plugged the modem into the demarcation jack outside (in the rain at night, but it proves a point to the phone company that will come to fix it... that the trouble isn't in the 6 feet of indoor wiring between the outside wall and the modem.

Once the busy work of setting up a work order for a Bell tech to come out was done, I sat down and my wife was chatting online via the "experimental" browser in her Kindle. I proceeded to plug the Blackberry back into the USB port of my laptop to charge and launched the BB Desktop to connect to the internet. Anna asked if she could borrow my computer, I asked "Why? I'll just share my internet with you." A couple of clicks later, and we were both sitting comfortably on the couch with our laptops, surfing the internet as usual.

It's amazing the connected lives we live these days. I kind of anticipated this sort of development when I was in high-school suffering from BBS withdrawal on a week-long camping trip in Algonquin Provincial Park. I could see a day coming when I'd probably always be connected. Well, at some point that just happened.

[Edit: 2:25 PM 13/01/2013 :
Bell guy came and switched us to another pair, one of the wire in our pair on te drop was broken. Damned squirrels!]