techno-fear
Wednesday, 9 December 2009 06:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eThis little house in the middle of heaven is owned by Julie. I pay board and look after the place. I'm pretty content with dial-up internet, even with all its inconveniences (incredibly slow speed of about 28kbps, blocking voice callers, ripoff telecommunication company prices, etc), but she has her heart set on broadband. It is understandable. When she's here she needs to be able to voip across Australia and to the other side of the planet and to use faster access to the net. Telstra have let the landlines out here get bad and we are so far from the nearest exchange it would have been unlikely we'd be able to get broadband over them anyway. So she got a satellite dish installed. It worked pretty well. Until...
Early last week we had a ferocious wind storm which blew many tree branches down. One branch whacked the satellite dish and put it out of alignment. No more satellite internet. No problem for me as I've been happy to use dial-up. But Jules was due on Tuesday (yesterday) so I had to get this fixed. I called up the Satellite people and they asked me to email some photos so I took pictures showing that it was now pointing at a tree instead of the wide space to the left of the tree and that there was no obvious damage to the unit. They dithered around for a few days til I phoned them up to find out what was happening. They hadn't even looked at the pictures. So now they wanted me to wait while they decided who was going to pay for the cost of fixing it (we'd told the installation technician that he shouldn't put it under that tree because that species drops branches the way other trees drop leaves). I asked if we could haggle about who pays later and just get it done. No.
Pretty disgusted, I got my niece to bring her Mum's laptop down ( I use Linux, while hers has Microsoft Windows with Internet Explorer which was required to log in to the satellite modem's settings -- I won't go off on a rant about dumbass lazy programmers who tie hardware to a specific program). When she got here I loosed off the holding bolts on the satellite dish and rotated it by hand, horizontally and vertically, while she read out the display from the laptop logged in to the modem.
In the end I was able to get signal strength and data rates almost as high as it originally was, simply because I wasn't scared of the technology. We have broadband internet again in time for Jules' arrival without waiting another week for the company to dither around and eventually present a bill of between $200 and $1000 for servicing it. I did it for free.
---
On another topic, I didn't finish my story in the month, but am still working on it. Hopefully I'll do more in coming months. I doubt much will be done during December; most of my family are gathering together this year. It will be fun and hectic.
Early last week we had a ferocious wind storm which blew many tree branches down. One branch whacked the satellite dish and put it out of alignment. No more satellite internet. No problem for me as I've been happy to use dial-up. But Jules was due on Tuesday (yesterday) so I had to get this fixed. I called up the Satellite people and they asked me to email some photos so I took pictures showing that it was now pointing at a tree instead of the wide space to the left of the tree and that there was no obvious damage to the unit. They dithered around for a few days til I phoned them up to find out what was happening. They hadn't even looked at the pictures. So now they wanted me to wait while they decided who was going to pay for the cost of fixing it (we'd told the installation technician that he shouldn't put it under that tree because that species drops branches the way other trees drop leaves). I asked if we could haggle about who pays later and just get it done. No.
Pretty disgusted, I got my niece to bring her Mum's laptop down ( I use Linux, while hers has Microsoft Windows with Internet Explorer which was required to log in to the satellite modem's settings -- I won't go off on a rant about dumbass lazy programmers who tie hardware to a specific program). When she got here I loosed off the holding bolts on the satellite dish and rotated it by hand, horizontally and vertically, while she read out the display from the laptop logged in to the modem.
In the end I was able to get signal strength and data rates almost as high as it originally was, simply because I wasn't scared of the technology. We have broadband internet again in time for Jules' arrival without waiting another week for the company to dither around and eventually present a bill of between $200 and $1000 for servicing it. I did it for free.
---
On another topic, I didn't finish my story in the month, but am still working on it. Hopefully I'll do more in coming months. I doubt much will be done during December; most of my family are gathering together this year. It will be fun and hectic.