First Suburban Sighting

Strolling through a local Tar-jay yesterday to do a little impulse purchasing and someone familiar looking turned the corner...
I took another look and realized that it was Raymond Cruz, who plays Detective Sanchez on The Closer on TNT.
This was a lot of fun for me since I am a fan of the show and was my first real suburban sighting (not counting Pasadena or Jet Li). :)

The Route(r) Not Taken

I have determined that I will never be in IS or IT. The recent saga of the router installation is the stuff that quests are made of (so long as it's never me again). I had the bright idea to increase the "reach power" of our wireless internet by purchasing a new router.

• The next day, I detached our old router, and reconnected the modem to the new router... successfully too.
• Tried all the remaining laptops in the house.
• 15 minutes later, amidst my triumph dance my mother noticed that she could no load any browser pages.
• Thus my struggle with technology began...
• I called the router number only to realize 20 minutes later I had to contact my ISP.
• In order to contact my ISP, my parents had to track down a username and password they hadn't even spied in years.
• After unhooking the new router and linking the desktop to the modem directly, I couldn't even get online anymore.
• After spending over 30 minutes on the phone with our ISP, I had created a new collection but to my dismay the connection would no longer load on start up.
• I spent another two hours searching the internet to find a solution that would create an automatic to the Internet. During with I started running various config commands.
• I hooked up our router again, and success...until 5 minutes later.
• I detached the router and hard linked the modem again....
• I hooked up our router again, working, working, working, not working...
• Called the router company help line again (on a side note, it's not that the service wasn't trying to be helpful, it's just that the gentleman on the phone didn't understand the difference between the phrase "and then you should" and the phrase "by the way."
• Real and internal conversation as I remember it...
  

• CS: Please go to (URL)
• Me: Ok, I'm there.
• CS: By the way, you should click on manual wizard.
• Me: Ok, clicked the wizard button
• CS: By the way, can you read to me what you see on the page now?
• Me: (pause) ok, blah, blah, blah
• CS: By the way, can you change this to...
• Me: (15 minutes later internally): ARGHHHH!!!!! Stop saying 'by the way'!!!!!
• CS: By the way, so I am afraid you'll have to call your ISP and tell them to change to from a half bridge (?) to a full bridge
• Me: (internally): When did I start playing cards?
• CS: By the way, I hope you found this call helpful, here is your case#(unitelligle mumbling).
• Me: Great, [by the way, thanks for nothing!] (please note I didn't say the part in brackets).

• I refused to call my ISP again
• I tried various thing for another 2 hours before shrieking out loud and running out the room I'd spent almost 8 hours straight in
• My mother called the asian "geek squad"
• Two days later, at the appointed time, NO ONE SHOWED UP.
• Called the company... no record of our appt
• After dealing with my mother (go mom!) they showed up in 10 minutes.
• 30 minutes later I learned, when you have an old modem and a new router, you need to download some firmware that allows the "new" to still work with "old" stuff.
  
• 4 hours later.... so far... so good.