Underachievement Unlocked

Fourth day without Internet at home. The first withdrawal symptoms are gone, and I’m now up to the third wave of symptoms: I’m shaking all the time, having trouble standing up, my fingers type in the air, etc.

So, in order to try and fill the void a bit, I went to the computer store district and bought a new modem. I needed that. To survive. No, actually, I needed that to get a spare serial port — I had a choice between buying a USB Wacom tablet, or a USB-IrDA adapter, meaning I would have bought the phone connection kit for nothing, so I chose the third option: keeping the cable (which has the advantage of also charging the battery, and being simpler to use than activating IrDA each time in the phone’s options screen) and switching to an USB modem (which is cheaper than a new tablet).

And now you ask me, how is buying a second modem less a waste of money than owning both a serial and an IrDA phone connection kits? Simple: my modem was old, I thought changing it couldn’t harm and it could only work better. And in any case I’d have a spare modem at hand, which can be much more useful than a spare phone connection cable.

In the end, it’s much better than I hoped: the new modem connects to my provider on the first try, I have no connection problems, and the DNS works immediately. I had had doubts when I tried connecting to another provider on Monday and it wasn’t working too well. But now it’s confirmed, and I don’t get it: how can a modem (an old guy who went through a heat wave last summer) work in a perfectly normal way except for having some trouble initiating connections and… contacting DNS servers?