What was lost has been found

The new best thing ever is that you can now stream Netflix's instant viewing content through your Xbox.  I've liked the British version of The Office for a long time, and I've always written off the American version as a pale imitation.  Well, since the American version is streamable, I decided to give it a second chance.  Turns out it's really damn good, even though it sheds some of the pathos of the British version.  

So last Thursday, I was watching a few episodes of that before bed, and then went to check something on the web.  No dice.  I did some futzing with the router and modem, and I could connect to the wireless network, but the router didn't seem to want to send the internet signal through.  It seemed that our old faithful Microsoft router (what, you didn't know that MS used to make routers five years ago?!) finally shat the bed.

Last Friday at work I did some poking around looking for new routers, and kept seeing recommendations for a router that could be ordered online, and that is awesome with some custom firmware.  I liked the idea, but since I hate playing with networking stuff even more than I hate going to the dentist, I wasn't relishing the idea.

Then, I remembered that I hadn't tapped the best resource of all: my company newsgroups, repository of all things geek.  Within twenty minutes of posting there for advice, one of the coders responded that he had the exact router that had been recommended, with the better firmware already installed, and he'd sell it to me for $25.  The only downside was that I wouldn't get it until Monday.

So we just went three days with essentially no internet at home.  I was able to stream The Office, because the modem was connected, and I could wire the Xbox to the modem, but our computers are in a different room, and running wires to them was too much work.  It's funny how much you realize that something is a part of your life until it's not there anymore.  Frankly, it was actually kind of nice to not be able to spend as much (or any) time surfing the web at home, since I do way more of that than I should.  I think I'm going to make a conscious effort to do less of that in the future.