Monday 7 October 2002

Pic of the day: KIWI mart. It's got nothing to do with NZ and its national bird, I believe, and not much more with the fruit. But now also with post office.

Not quite ADSL day

ADSL package finally arrived. I found the note in my mailbox when I got home from work. Luckily the local mail office is now located in the Kiwi shop, which is open till 8PM. So I got it (and a bit before that, too). It was a beautiful day to walk, chilly enough that caps was a good idea, but the last of the day's sun made the autumn berries and some trees glow with color. My mind was filled with song (but then again it usually is). But I knew my problems weren't solved with this, of course.

Spent the evening trying to get the ADSL to work. It did not, and as usual the error message was very vague: It could not get contact with the other machine. I suspect this has to do with the USB Ethernet card. It is listed as working OK in the control panel, but the icon on the sys tray says a cable is not connected. This could of course be the cable from the "ADSL modem", except that one is connected all right, to the network card and to the splitter. It's not glowing anywhere, but it is making small ticking sounds. Oh well. Tomorrow is time to call the various suppliers and hear them insist that it's someone else's fault, I guess.

Neither Jensen (sub-supplier of the USB card) nor Telenor have more than the vagues FAQs either, even though every review I have ever seen of someone trying to install ADSL has been similar to this. Things are delayed by days or weeks, then don't work, and there is little or no help unless they reveal that they work for a large magazine.

***

Anyway, there went the evening down the drain. After I gave up, I was highly motivated to play my Paladin character for a while, and do some definitive Sword for the Lord play. Undead are so much more acceptable targets than large corporations. And a good thing too. There's enough mad people in the real world as is.

The Norwegian Animal Liberation Front let loose several thousand mink last night. Most have been captured again, a hundred or more have been run over by cars, and the rest are facing the upcoming subarctic winter with no experience in hunting on their own. But at least they die free, right? Methinks both the beastly freedom fighters and the mink farmers need some inner enlightenment about their relation to the animal kingdom.

I don't think I need that right now, though. ^*^