LAN WAN thank you Mam

If God was a geek, then the PC would have been the apple. It sits there all tempting and tasty, promising unimaginable delights and then you take one bite and it shits all over you and turns your life into a Möbius strip of misery. Geeks love things like Möbius strips. I bet when geeks get married they give each other Möbius rings.

I think this inscription says 'Two Shall Become One When One Is To The Power Of Zero. LOL LMFAO JEOMK.'

The computer is the revenge of the geek. Sick of being tormented about their lack of sporting prowess and pallor some geeks decided to invent a universal machine  with one important catch, only geeks could make it work and only geeks could fix it when it didn't.

What is truly fustrating is that I had every opportunity to learn how these mysterious boxes of silicon implants operated and ignored them all. My brother was into all things computational and every weekend brought home a BBC Model B computer to write educational software for the Burnside High School French department. My only contribution was to come up with a name for the wee game where you had to shoot the French words for different colours if the colour of the word didn't match the colour...of the word.

For example...

Bleu

Rouge

Bleu Clair

Jaune

Bleu foncé

Orange
BANG!

I called it 'Kolour Killer'.

Every weekend I sat on my brother's bed reading out thousands of lines of BASIC code to make a blob rotate or create some game where you made a blob avoid other blobs. After hours of me reading and my brother typing, (I would name him but people from JADE might be reading), he would set the program in motion and invariably it would crash. This was obviously my fault as I must have said colon instead of semi-colon which for some reason buggered everything up. He would force me to go through every line again until I hurled the 'Bits & Bytes' magazine to the ground and stormed out of the room to make the word 'BOOBLESS' on my FX 82. Later I would apologise and ask if I could play 'Elite'.

I don't know why he bothered as I already knew how to make the best computer program ever.

10 CLS
20 PRINT "GREG IS COOL"
30 GOTO 20
RUN

Recently I had to set up my internet again and I wished with all my heart I had studied those 'Bits & Bytes' mags instead of wasting hours trying to save up enough credits for a docking computer. I had brought over a wireless modem from New Zealand and foolishly thought it would just be a matter of plugging one end into the phoneline and the other into whatever hole it fitted into in my computer. My first dilemma was finding the phone holes in Australia are smaller than the New Zealand ones but the same size as the hole you stick the cable into on the phone. Luckily I  had a small double dongle dingle that went both ways so dodged that technical bullet with aplomb.

I fired everything up and my modem was flashing like the eye of a Cylon which was encouraging. It told me that it had found my DSL but couldn't see the internet for the trees. Even though it couldn't find the internet it told me to use my browser to go to 192.168.1.254 which was silly. I went there and it wouldn't let me change my PPPoA to PPPoE. There was no way of fiddling with my VPI or VCU, WAN IP or DNS. I couldn't even set the name of my wireless network to pusspuss.

After a bit of googling via a webstick kindly donated by Chris, I found that my modem had been castrated and lobotimised by Telecom to make sure it couldn't get frisky with another network. I got all flash and managed to flash my firmware and turned everything Dutch but that didn't help. Telecom were managing to arse up everything from across the Tasman.

So, I went and purchased a new modem and brought it home and found I had purchased a wireless router. I knew things weren't right when the installation DVD told me to plug the ethernet cable from the WAN port of the router to the LAN port of the modem which I thought I had just purchased.  I now how a router to a rooted modem which was also a router. After my huge outlay of $24 for my Edimax wireless router I was determined to utilise it so returned and spent another whopping $33 on a top of the line Tenda ADSL2+ Router and modem with no wireless. I now had a modem and two routers and a rooted router and a modem.

I plugged in my Tenda tenderly and noticed that the installation CD was the size of a small baby's fist and wouldn't play in my CD drive. Using my webstick again I managed to navigate through the fiendish Tenda site and download the Installation Wizard. I unzipped my pants before unzipping the software as my excitment built. The wizard told me in broken English to type in my username and password and after seconds that felt like hours I had broadbrand streaming into my back port.

Then I plugged the WAN of my Router into the LAN of my modem and the computer cable into the LAN of the router and my stream turned into an intermittent trickle of pusspuss. Everything was horrendously slow. I had created a wireless dial-up network. I was sad.

Two days later I was happy. I found a website written by a geek who had forgiven the world for its torment and gave me a wonderfully easy to follow how to guide. All those sites that said WAN to LAN lied. Just turn off the DHCP server in your second router, make sure its LAN IP address is different to any other device in your network and then connect an ethernet cable from the LAN port of the first router to a LAN port of the second.

I still don't know what all these acronyms mean but I know if I did they would mean even less. All I care about is that I can now watch Robyn videos and funny cats on YouTube and blog sporadically. I am a happy happy LAN.