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| Day 13: | Monday, 16 September 2002 | ||
| New Thing: | Not getting on the internet when I want to | ||
| Weather: | Clear and pleasant, mid 60s overall | ||
| Money Spent: | $10.00 AUS | $ 5.52 USD | |
| 7:17am | Well, no alarm yet, but the first flutter of eyes and wings. |
| 7:30am | Now the silly alarm went off. |
| 7:56am | The boy disappeared to muster up in the lobby with the other American for the trek to work. I was quite delighted to have the room to myself for a nap, and of course, we did buy a truckload of junk food yesterday... them's good eating. |
| 11:42am | Housekeeping made enough noise to wake the dead and cause them to dance in the streets, but soon enough after their departure, I was able to fall asleep by watching some of the fascinating financial news on CNN. (yawn) Fascinating, indeed... |
| 6:37pm | Tubby arrives back in the room. So much for continuing to walk around naked any more today. |
| 6:54pm | Owing to otherwise risk having to ensure conversation with the Bald Wonder, I turned to the internet connection in the room... |
| 6:59pm | ... or so I thought. Can't connect. I get an IP address, and TCP/IP connectivity, but nothing across any of the basic ports (port 80, specifically). I complain to Baldie. |
| 7:06pm | After looking very concerned (although I suspect his focus was more on the Pringles I had on the desk, not on my problem), he ended up calling the hotel internet people, which turned out to be an American in... America. Oh, the irony. |
| 7:11pm | Proving that those tech support people aren't all as brilliant as they'd be if I were hiring them, the guy had Baldie check to see if proxies where checked in IE, and tried to sell a "reboot" to fix it. No sale. And no workie. |
| 7:13pm | We're put on hold with Paul, fro, STSN (the internet service company). I'd look up their site, but... well, y'know. |
| 7:24pm | Paul returns and says that after "a rat race and a goose chase" (quaint), he's found Chris here at the hotel, who will pop by and give it a look. Groovy. |
| 7:27pm | Chris stopped on by, straightened out the wires (they seem to have been switched, so there was only a wire with a single pair, versus two pair, coming into the DSL modem). But still no dice. Chris was going to pop down to the network equipment area and reset the room's connection, as apparently other rooms are not having a problem. Which is a good thing, I guess. (The hotel is basically reselling the service from STSN, not hosting it.) |
| 7:36pm | Chris returns, with an additional DSL modem in hand, and a second device, which I suspect would be used for provisioning the modem. We'll see... |
| 7:47pm | No dice, at the end of the story. The connection is apparently supposed to launch you into the company's billing site. We kept getting this error in IE, which was both vague but not at all helpful. But Chris sided with Tubby in that it appears to be server side, not equipment based on this side. For this agreement, Tubby awarded Chris a FrankPen. Sure, he was pleasant and helpful, but those aren't really his pens to give away, now are they? That aside, I think Chris earned his pen this evening, even if the STSN people can't sort their technical bits and bytes out. (And yes, we gave this error to the STSN support guy, but his troubleshooting flowchart apparently does not address server-side problems in the billing system. Oh well.) |
| 8:01pm | The Bald Wonder seemed inclined to tinker on the computer, so I decided to go have a float in the bath tub. This was good for a while, but I was soon regaled with a brief but creative string of profanities as he apparently discovered some list of schedule requests hasn't been updated since January, despite his understanding to the contrary. Goodness, such horrors in the world... I don't know how I can go on. Oh wait, I remember... I just don't care about his petty troubles. Yes, that'll do the trick. |
| 8:53pm | Have you ever noticed that even after an hour in the tub, providing your feet are webbed, they don't wrinkle. Jealous? |
| 9:07pm | There's no apparent end in sight for whats-his-name's evening, but I'm off to bed. Ta-ta. |