Practicalmadness

I have only this to say: having worked in a technical support department where the last letter in DSL was often replaced with a certain four-letter word it rhymes with, and "provisioning" was the means by which the Big Telco In The Sky fucked up customer and support tech alike...well, I'm surprised to say that my DSL self-installation has been so *fucking* easy it's insane.

The hardest part was calling SBC Ameritech to get them to issue a temporary username and password. See, I'm used to a school network where there is no need for a user/password -- you just get on. Cable modems and some DSL providers work the same way, but Ameritech uses PPPoE (that's Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet), and as such the only differences between ADSL and dialup are the speed and the need to dial-in. Basically, our DSL line is always on, but we have to log onto the network to browse.

That said, the new SpeedStream router I bought so Jenny and I could share the DSL line has a built-in PPPoE client so to us it will seem just like we're back home on the old ethernet.

Now to find enough Ethernet cable to reach across the room to my desk...