Cabling Crawl

Almost 11 hours after the venture began, our internet connection has been repaired and the connection is now, like FAST! After living for about 2 months with somewhat better than dial up, this is lightning speed. Didn't bother at first, because I thought the computer probably had tonnes of spyware because of where the kids surfed and what they downloaded everyday, Ad-Aware notwithstanding. Then we were busy with college visits and summer roadtrips. Two weeks ago, I discovered we were almost out of disk space (seems 250GB is not sufficient these days for the kinds of things we store) so went on a mad clean up hard disk rampage and also got a 500GB external drive to free up disk space and get more virtual memory and pagefile space for the poor computer. Still didn't help. Must be the miserable cranky router that seems to be dying bit by bit on us. But also a sneaky suspicion that maybe the ISP modem is not quite up to scratch or getting senile.

So today, bought a cable modem to replace the ISP modem. Woah, fast! But router was also flaky. The old one from Singapore has more or less died and the small newer one from Fry's would not connect more than one machine. So got a high speed router at the same time as the cable modem and thought I would try a brand I had not tried before. It was DOA - wouldn't even power up. So back to the shop at dinner time to exchange for a better known brand. Two hours later, after running cables all over the floor, everything works. And works securely too. I like!

Faster speed also means more vulnerability to spyware and such. Hope the kids exercise good judgement and restraint and remember always to surf safely.

On another note, this is the long Labor Day weekend. On Friday, I brought the kids to another A's game at Oakland McAfee Coliseum and the A's won against the Detroit Tigers but after a tough fight. The tickets were FOC, courtesy of company. And the A's scored two home runs by hitting the balls out of range so again, free pizzas for everyone in the stadium. So for dinner, we had 4 personal pizzas at Round Table and added some garlic twists. Nice!

Will write about the long lazy summer days another time and post the tonnes of photos we took from the two road trips. YY have almost all of them too and so has Ah Yee. Wonder how she is and whether she has shown her children and grandchildren all the pictures from her month's stay here in North America.

My back is sore from crawling around laying the cables and making everything work. So I am done for the night. Cheers!