Internet at home - it's ALIVE!!!

Our DSL got hooked up on Thursday, and my lack of previous experience setting up DSL prompted a call to tech support. They don't have much official Mac support (problems getting their site to work with Safari, not supporting multiple machines through Airport, etc), but the technician knew what they were doing and got me set up with one machine without too much trouble. I tried setting up multiple machines later on, but it wasn't working, and I was barely able to get the one machine connection working again by the end of the night.

I finally had another chance to look at it today, and I got it all worked out. I first added the Airport base station to the mix (with WPA encryption) and got that working for my Powerbook. Then I had to turn off the encryption to make sure Lisa's laptop would work, and then turn it back on - all of which took a couple of hours (interspersed with dinner).

There are still some weird things, such as how I have trouble connecting to web sites if another machine is downloading big files.

My biggest annoyance/complaint/issue is with the amount of knowledge and work this still takes. It took probably 4 hours of work, a tech support call, and a bunch of searching on the internet (at work) to get this to work. And if you found this blog from Google or something, it's worth mentioning at this point that I'm a software engineer - I work with computers ALL DAY LONG. I feel sorry for anyone over 30 (well, maybe 40) that tries to do this sort of thing without a kid in the house - it's not fun.

Part of the problem may be my setup - 2 Macs and a Windows laptop, all wireless. It's a bit outside of the norm. Providers these days seem to have everything worked out pretty well for the 1 home = 1 machine case; unfortunately lots of homes are getting multiple machines (though I have no hard evidence or even links to back that statement up). I'm sure they will start supporting this stuff eventually, but for now it just supports the "law" that I have in my head:

more technology = more problems

Weird Al should do a parody song about it. Maybe "could" is a better word for it.