Roy's Online Thoughts

Today was a thoroughly frustrating day because I couldn't get online! I'm piggy-backing on my neighbour's wireless connection and even though the signal is low, I can usually get online. And when he doesn't turn his modem on - such as when it's being maintained, I can usually pick up one of the signals floating around. Not today though. The entire day was wasted fiddling around with my laptop thinking I had contracted malicious spyware somewhere. I ran a total of 7 different anti-spyware programs. Yes you read that rightly - 7 different programs, including one specifically designed to rid PCs of the sort brought on by Kazaa. I use Limewire so I thought better be safe than sorry!

The removers did turn up peculiar bots deeply sited and passed over by Ad-Aware, but at the end of all that rigmarole, I still couldn't connect!

So I began the tedious process of "trial by elimination" and concluded that since the laptop worked perfectly the night before, what was causing it to fail NOW? I went over everything that had happened whilst I was online the night before and recalled that the Java Runtime Environment had been updated. Bingo! Remove that, and the Google Bar and say bye-bye to my problems. So I did that and the blessed thing still refused to connect!

By now it was early evening and I was about to kick the wall in frustration. Kick I did and very nearly missed my moggie who gave me a "what did I do wrong?" injured look before scurrying off. I retired to cook dinner and whilst I was eating, the phone rang. It was a colleague/friend whom I hadn't spoken to in a while. Jim asked me why I sounded so edgy and I ended up unloading the whole sorry story at him. His solution was simple - take the laptop outside to where the signal is stronger. And do you know, he was right!

I learned something today: sometimes the solution is right there in front of you but we belabour it with unnecessary postulations. I had suspected early on that the signal was too weak as I noticed that the connection was sending packets but not receiving any. But I chose to ignore it and paid the price.

Anyway, even if it was a wasted day, I still have the cleanest, spyware-free laptop around! And that had better count for something!