Late update today! Here's the lowdown: the Comcast tech, through the power of his touch, fixed my cable modem. I'm now using my awesome-tastic and highly reliable Linksys modem, so things should be up and running for grood now. The Comcast tech just checked the signal strength, which was fine, and then plugged in the Linksys modem, which immediately came right on and started working. Magic, I tell you.

Okay, not really. Here's what I think happened (some of this you saw already on Wednesday, but I wanna make sure everybody's up to speed; pay attention, this is important). I've been running on my RCA cable-modem, the one that responds badly to vibrations 'cause something's loose in it somewhere, for about 3 years. Last year, when HW bought me the wireless setup, it came with a Linksys modem. So I was all, let's switch since the RCA is ghetto.

So I called up Comcast, gave them the MAC address (the number that identifies network objects), and they tried to set it up. No dice. The nice Indian on the phone informed me I probably needed a signal booster, 'cause my signal strength was weak.

So I went out and bought a signal booster, but then the RCA box started working pretty reliably. It would go out periodically, but a few whaps on the top of it, and it'd start working fine. Until this week, when the RCA started giving up the ghost. So I put the booster on the line, plugged in the Linksys modem, and called up Comcast.

They still had the Linksys MAC address on file, but it turned out they had one digit wrong; where I had said "A2," they had heard "82," 'cause they were Indian and I don't speak English very well. So they corrected that, but STILL couldn't get the modem to work. So they scheduled the tech to come out today, some time between 10 and 2. I took the booster off the line, plugged the RCA box back in, and made do for a few days.

So today, the guy comes out, and everything works. He informs that regular cable boosters don't work very well with the cable modems, because they screw up the signal going in both directions, which the modem requires. So what had really happened was that a year ago when I had tried, the Linksys box didn't work 'cause they had screwed up the MAC address. On Wednesday, it wouldn't work because my booster box (that I thought was HELPING), was screwing everything up. Today, with the corrected MAC address, and no booster, it fired right up.

Argh.

So now I have to figure out why my router won't let me in. It works (in that I can get to the internet from all my various computers), but it won't let me access it to make changes and update my IP (if it has indeed changed). I better drink some Sambuca first.