It’s working. I don’t know why it’s working.

Today I bought a new Cisco Linksys WRT120N WiFi router to go along with the new WiMax connection that was setup for me last week by Ezecom here in Phnom Penh.

I won’t bore you with the exact details of my fun evening fighting with technology, but will abbreviate it into a series of points.

My evening went like this:

  1. Set everything up (ignoring wireless routers instructions to install their quick-setup wizard software).
  2. Do the thing that I know is the correct procedure (enter PPPoE details, click connect).
  3. Feel confused when nothing happens.
  4. Re-enter settings, re-plug cables, re-set router, power off/on WAN box, re-enter settings, and restart computer in various orders.
  5. Return to point 2 (but skip point 5 next time around).
  6. Reset everything and try the wireless router wizard I explicitly avoided at the start.
  7. Get annoyed with wireless router wizard’s inexplicably convoluted practice.
  8. Feel somewhat unsurprised when the router wizard fails to help, offers useless error messages, and has a troubleshooter that completely fails to do anything useful other than crash itself.
  9. Get annoyed to find out the wireless router wizard has silently installed a 730mb ‘magic network’ program that I neither need nor want.
  10. Uninstall all the wizard crap, reset router, try the basic steps again.
  11. Feel disheartened when nothing happens.
  12. Spend a while searching stuff on the net.
  13. Try some more random things, unplug and reset the router multiple times, power on and off the WAN connection, and restart computer.
  14. Feel quite pissed off that there’s still nothing going on in internet land.
  15. Do a load of research looking up IP addresses and trying to fathom Ezecom’s network setup and possible hostnames for the PPPoE connection.
  16. Admit defeat and accept that I’ll have to call Ezecom support tomorrow.
  17. Decide randomly to try once more (having changed absolutely no settings whatsoever, just using the bog standard ‘this should work’ setup).
  18. It works.

I should be delighted that I triumphed over technology, but I didn’t really. It just mysteriously didn’t work for 2.5 hours, and then did.

This waste of time battle with technology, and blog post, was fuelled by foolishly having a coffee after dinner.

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