Apparently, We Didn't Know What We Were Doing

This weekend we received a bunch of fun items in the mail. Starting on Friday with my shirt.woot t-shirt that I'd been waiting impatiently for. Followed by a box from Newegg with computer parts that Rob revealed I was getting as part of my birthday present....and then on Saturday more computer parts and a Roku Box (which was going to be a birthday present that I would have to wait until my birthday for, but it came in a box that said Roku all over it...so the cat was out of the bag).

So on Saturday we started by setting up the Roku Box--which was a piece of cake, mostly. It has a wireless internet receiver so that we don't have to run cords all over the living room (yay!). Unfortunately that meant we needed to know our WEP Key/Password thingy for the wireless router. Rob set that router up with his old computer and we couldn't find the password anywhere (even after trying to install the software for the router on both of our computers). So when Rob set out to upgrade my computer with the parts we received (1G graphics card, additional 2G RAM, and a new power supply to support them) we plugged his old computer into my moniter....and realized that the hard drive had crashed and we couldn't get into windows on his old box. Rob got my computer upgraded with only one little hitch (he had to open it back up because of a loose cable)....then he reconfigured the wireless router so that we could get a new WEP Key which we promptly got entered in to the Roku Box setup screen....and then we lost internet. So here we were with these two new toys that we couldn't even play with. We were without internet all Saturday evening and Sunday morning. Of course the story doesn't end there.

On Saturday evening we called Mediacom to see if it was an outage or if something had gone wrong when Rob was changing the wireless router. The message indicated to us that there was an outage in our area. So we occassional reset our cable modem to reboot the system to check if the internet was up and running. When we still didn't have internet access at lunch time on Sunday, Rob called again and found out that there were no more outages. So he had to go through a ten minute long automated program that asks if your modem is plugged in and if you've tried resetting it and all that fun stuff for people who have no idea what they are doing. After a good ten minutes, the automated program informed him that because he had called in on the digital phone (from Mediacom) that he would have to hang up and call in with another phone. So we called with the cell, and 15-20 minutes later, finally got to talk to someone, who told us that we had bumped our standby button on the front of our modem. Sure enough....we both felt like idiots. I wondered why that particular question wasn't part of the automated program for people who don't know what they are doing...cuz we sure felt like we didn't know what were doing after that.

On the plus side, everything is working now. My computer is awesome...and can now play games smoothly that were chuggy before. The Roku box is fantastic--if you're already paying for Netflix...I WHOLE HEARTEDLY recommend getting one. It's easy to use, the video and sound quality are as good as watching the show on cable, and it sure beats sitting at the computer to watch stuff.