This morning as the day started, I put the following out on Twitter:

Today I predict: it won’t snow; the sun will shine; the wait at the dr office will be long; Linksys cust support won’t be helpful.

Now that the day is coming to an end, here’s what happened….

It didn’t snow. Snow wasn’t in the forecast and isn’t supposed to be in the forecast the rest of this week. So, this was a fairly safe prediction. However, it’s past time to be snowing here. We need the snow! Not only does it bring the badly needed moisture, it also covers up all the dry, brown, ugly landscape. Let it snow!

It was a mostly sunny day today. There were some high, wispy clouds, but they don’t really count for anything (maybe they’re harbringers of snow?). The sun shone brightly the entire day. Again, this isn’t much of a hard prediction. We get a lot of sun here in Pocatello, Idaho.

The wait at the eye doctor’s office was indeed long. Dad had an appointment for a checkup for his macular degeneration. Both eyes had gone wet and he has received the prescribed four shots in each eye to dry up the problem. This was to verify that the treatment had been effective. We waited in the waiting room about a half-hour past the appointment time and then spent a fair amount of time waiting between visits from the nurse or the doctor. The news was mixed. His right eye is currently dry, but his left eye has started bleeding again and is now wet. So, he’s on a new schedule of shots in the eyes. Today he got a shot in the left eye. Next week he’ll get one in the right eye. So, this process will continue for a while. I go along on these appointments to make sure that mother understands everything that was said and gets all of her questions answered.

In the end, Linksys Customer Service was indeed helpful. It took quite a while, but everything is now working. When I was running the web servers here at home, I paid a fairly hefty monthly bill to Qwest for a block of Internet Protocol addresses and for a fairly big broadband data pipe. Now that all the web servers are now hosted at BlueHost, I revised my setup with Qwest which would reduce my monthly phone bill by more than half. But, that included giving up the assigned IP addresses. Yesterday the power went out and the Qwest device rebooted and all the Internet access from home ceased. Last night I got it partially restored, but couldn’t get the Linksys wireless router to play nicely with the Qwest DSL modem. I gave it another try this morning before going to the eye doctor with dad to no avail.

After getting back home, I first got on a live chat session with Linksys. They tried a couple of things, and then sent me to Qwest. After another significant period of time on hold, the technician (in a very noisy environment with lots of foreign accents … probably India) worked through the process of making sure that the Qwest DSL modem worked correctly. There was a setting that needed to be changed, but otherwise it was set up correctly. However, they couldn’t help me with setting up the Linksys router.

So it was back to Linksys Customer Service and another person with a pretty thick accent. She first made sure that I could connect to the Internet directly through the Qwest DSL modem and then we went through setting up the Linksys router. There were several things that needed to be set up beyond what the manual said. The result was a working system and we again have wireless access in the house. That took a little more than three hours with half of that spent on hold.

Meanwhile, I’ve started taking apart the networked computers that are no longer needed here at home, and there are several of them. Now the question is, what do I do with them?