The ISDN is history…the link light went red on Friday, so I guess the “five working days” have passed. The ADSL is still working fine, but the HomeNet broke yesterday — one of my $19.95 special network interface cards died! After procuring a new card (had to spring for $29.95 this time!), the HomeNet is alive and well again.

That’s pretty much it for February 1999. Almost 7:00 PM — time to watch GMU and ODU play for the CAA Basketball Championship Game. Go Patriots!

After talking to four (4) different people at Bell Atlantic, I finally managed to get my ISDN service cancelled within the “next five working days.”

Happy Valentine’s Day. The ADSL is still working fine and, after a bit of hardware and software reconfiguration, all three PCs (Harry, Elwood and Jake) on the HR HomeNet now have Internet access via ADSL. If all remains stable for the next week or so, the ISDN line will become history.

Unlike a few weeks ago, I can’t say: “If its Tuesday, I must be in Belgium!” Instead I’m here at home waiting for the next step in the ADSL installaton process. If I’m lucky, the Bell Atlantic installer will show up early today and get the service up and running.

Well its 10:30 AM and no installer yet. So much for early AM appointments! Oops, I spoke too soon; someone is knocking at the door! Three trucks out front, three installers at the front door (as it turned out, two were trainees). The ADSL finally came up at around 1:30 PM. Since I already have an ISDN line and had an IP address assigned to it, Bell Atlantic had to give me another IP address for the ADSL (caused lots of telephone calls back and forth to the support center before this all got figured out!). However, all ended well as the ASDL is now working and, as advertised, it is really fast. And best of all, its”instant on” to the Internet — No more dialing numbers and waiting for the connection to get established.

Still raining here. Its 9:30 AM and I’m sitting here waiting for a Bell Atlantic installer to show up and install something called a “splittter.” The splitter installation is the first step in a two-day exercise by Bell Atlantic to provide me with an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL). If this all works OK, I’ll have much faster access to the Internet than my present 56K modem and 64K ISDN connections. Once the ADSL is up and running, I’ll have 640K of bandwidth incoming from the Internet and 90K outgoing to the Internet. Stay tuned for updates on the progress on and results of the ADSL service provisioning.

Great weather here today. Its been raining most of the day. Didn’t do much all day except give Buster a pedicure and do some cosmetic updates to the Web site. Also watched a really funny movie called “There’s Something About Mary.” As usual, I didn’t get around to seeing it while it was making the rounds in the local movie theaters…Blockbuster Video was made for people like me!