The visit from the Comcast Guy yesterday did not go well.

The visit from the Comcast Guy yesterday did not go well. The Comcast Guy was great and competent and had all his customer contact skills highly honed, but the installation didn't work. He sez our cable's frayed somewhere or kinked or otherwise out of sorts.

Our cable is inside the wall.

Now what?

We could call a contractor to pull new cable through the wall, he said. Comcast doesn't do that, he said.

We could have Comcast connect to the junction box down behind the front stairs by draping wire across the front of the building from the window near my computer to the junction box at walk level, but his supervisor would have to okay that sort of work and his supervisor wasn't in yesterday and would have to make a site visit in any case to see what the issues were ...

His Nibs has a call in to the Supervisor Guy with a suggestion that they just run a new piece of line from the pole I can see outside my window. Easy peasy. Pretend this place was never wired.

We'll see.

With the line frayed, I can get neither high-speed Internet nor TV channels up to Channel 7 on our basic-rate cable. The TV I didn't much care about but the 'net connection ...

I have no news feed with my dialup ISP so must resort to Googja if I want to read Usenet at all. Usenet using the Googja interface is ugly and unwieldy, so Usenet's been taking a hit. Dialup gives me only a 33-42KB connection so fuggedabout playing with anything that's going to take a while to download or upload. Plus the phone line is measured-rate -- the cheapest deal we could find when we needed some sort of line for the burglar alarm. We never intended to use the line for dial-up computer connection or even vox-to-vox for that matter. I have to watch the minutes I spend online, watch the time of day that I'm spending minutes online.

Good thing I've been away or otherwise busy.

Tomorrow the mover guys will pick up a last load of stuff at Dale -- the heavy stuff that we can't (or would rather not) just load into the car and put our backs out moving. The mover guys will take the load to the loft where they'll drop off some bits and pick up some bits. From the loft, they'll head over here where they'll carry the heavy stuff down the steps and up the steps and up even more steps so we don't have to.

Thursday we'll finish clearing out Dale.

Come Friday, if all goes well, escrow closes.

x'd fingers.