The Eco-debacle in My Home Cyberspace

or How I Made Truce with Reality

It has been a week since I posted something. I've gone silent for that long in the past, but never because my home computer network both betrayed me and resisted fixing so thoroughly. The story of my experiences in the past week falls far short of tragedy, but it never once got funny, either. It was kind of a bogging down in an uncharted swamp, a particularly unexotic wandering in fog, a seemingly endless journey on a train to nowhere, a pitiful confrontation with bureaucratic indifference, a virtual hostage experience with no opportunity to fall in love with my captor. I'll add right here, right now, that whoever you may be, random reader, you are forgiven for not noticing that I was gone.

I do most of my writing on an older Mac IBook. It's familiar and I like that I've worn the A off the A-key entirely. The S is going, as well. But the microprocessor is too slow, so I can't upgrade to the latest Mac OS and can't update my internet browsers (like Safari or Firefox or, even, Explorer.) Using an older browser works most of the time, but, increasingly, there are websites and services that I can't access. And, when I want to access design or layout or link-embedding features on this blog, I have to switch to Brendan's Gateway PC. This is rarely a problem, but it ain't efficient.

So, I bought a used IBook with a faster microprocessor only to discover that my new (used) Mac wouldn't play well (at all, actually) with my Linksys wireless router. This is not a good thing, because the alternative is a hard wired connection, which though perfectly adequate, would require lots of new wiring I was reluctant to run. But Thursday, I decided that I had to connect the new-old IBook no matter what it might demand of me. In committing to that course of action, I started a cascade of events that I still haven't entirely recovered from.

My Thursday efforts to connect appeared to crash or freeze my router, That evening, I called the helpline for the manufacturer and reached a very considerate Asian Indian man who, but for our difficulties communicating, might have helped, but didn't. It didn't work, either, when I called the help line later that evening and spoke to an individual working out of Mumbai (or wherever in India the service is based). By the end of the second call, Thursday had morphed into Friday. I opted for bedtime and a fresh start come daylight.

I woke feeling optimistic. I called Mumbai, or wherever, again. The tech on the other end seemed happy to talk to me, but we didn't make anything good happen. I wrestled with the problem on and off during the day Friday. At least, I wasn't in sometimes unitelligible conversations with people living somewhere else, but being at best a two or three-trick pony with computers made me feel as though I spent the day trying to convert lead into gold. I did decide that I would buy a new router on Saturday and, once more optimistic, went to bed.

Saturday afternoon, I bought the new router, a Belkin. I followed the instructions for installation on the CD that came with the router, but I couldn't make it work. In fact, connectivity seemed to recede. I also tried to reinstall the operating system on the new-old IBook and ended up with the screen frozen, the CD stuck in the disc drive of computer, and no apparent way to get it out or restarted. Saturday evening, giving up on computers, I focused on TV and drinking, which seemed helpful at the time.

But Sunday morning, when I woke up, still without internet access, I was also somewhat the worse for the drinking or the TV or something. The rest of the day? A big dose of trying the same old things and walking away in disgust.

Oh, yeah, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday, there was at least one call a day to the Comcast help desk to no avail. Nothing wrong with their modem, they reported with remarkable consistency. And because I insisted in calling on my landline, for which Comcast is also the provider, the call would get dropped each time when the help desk would helpfully remotely restart the modem, temporarily cutting phone service, just in case the modem needed clearing.

Changing direction on Monday, I actually called the Geek Squad. They would charge me $100 just to show up on Tuesday and fix the problem. This, of course, was a deal and I quickly agreed.

During the day on Moday, using an ethernet cord I had on-hand, I hard-wired the connection between the modem and my old, always previously reliable IBook. Thus connected, I could bypass troublesome routers, get a hard connection for one computer, but live without wireless printer connection and without wireless connection for the PC and, still, with the new-old IBook stuck on the Apple screen and stuck with a nonresponsive CD in the disc drive.

I also had to sit on the floor with the old IBook (which has an aging, quickly drained battery) balanced on my lap, connected on the left by short ethernet cord to the Comcast modem, connected on the right via Apple charger to a slightly more distant electrical outlet. I don't want to say I wasn't grateful to actually be connected, but it was less than a writer's dream.

So happy to see the Geek Squad guy on Tuesday morning--no afternoon, really--that I almost kissed him when he arrived and right there offered him a piece of chocolate cake with another piece as bonus, if he set things straight. It would be nice to report that he pulled it off.

But when he left later that afternoon, I had only the hard-wired connection with which I'd started the day. He did get the bad disc out of the new-old IBook, a good trick considering there wasn't an emergency eject that could be managed with a paper clip and that the computer was not talking to anyone or anything, wouldn't force quit, wouldn't restart, wouldn't go anywhere. He left charging me only the $100 I owed for him showing up. He wouldn't take the cake, never went to the bathroom, never took a drink, and stayed about two hours extra before he went off to his next appointment for which he was going to be very late. I hope he kept his job.

While the Geek Squad guy was around and after, I called Comcast three times. I don't want to describe what some of those calls were like, but the first time Comcast remotely restarted their modem, even though we told them not to do it because we were talking to them on the landline.

The second time I called and scheduled an appointment for their tech guy on Wednesday. My position was that Comcast couldn't keep telling me that the problem wasn't their modem. They were going to have to send someone out to see the problem for themselves. They told me I'd have to pay for it, a not unreasonable $19.95 charge, if their tech didn't have to do too much. I'll pay, I said, I want you guys to see what I see. Fine, the help desk responded, we'll schedule the appointment for some time between 11 and 2 on Wednesday.

I only made the third call to Comcast on Tuesday because I got a robocall from them as I sat on the couch, in the dark, head throbbing. We are calling to confirm your appointment for Wednesday between 5 and 8, the robovoice said. Taking care not to injure my telephone, I punched my way through a number of menus until I got a live person. I believe I was quite self-controlled as I rescheduled the appointment for the original 11 to 2 slot.

Barely prompt, at one o'clock or so on Wednesday, the Comcast tech arrived. He was pleasant, claimed he never left without getting a customer connected, and then departed, leaving me with a wireless connection to the PC that dropped within moments of his departure.

I turned all the computers off, disconnected the router, turned off the modem and left the house for a pleasant walk around the block, maybe six times around, or so. After returning home, I restarted the modem, restarted the Gateway PC, stuck the install disc for the old router into the PC and carefully followed the step-by-step instructions for "activating your router." It worked, a wirless connection. Buoyed by my success, I restarted my old IBook, the barely adequate one with the too slow microprocessor, followed additional step by step instructions and wirelessly connected with that one, too.

The new-old IBook sits, still inoperable and unconnected. I think I'll take it to an Apple Store and get their opinion. In the meantime, here I am, blogging about my almost life in a virtual world that nearly, but not quite, bested me. It's Thursday. I am wirelessly connected on two computers, which like each other and like the router. The modem is doing what it's sposed to do. I am wirelessly connected to the printer.

I am connected, therefore, I am. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The Internet and the Rush of Life

Alan Neff responded to the post about Arthur C. Clarke. "The rush of fully determined life in the Universe created the Internet," Alan wrote.

Arguable, to be sure, and it gets us a very safe distance away from Bill Gates, but I don't agree, which in itself may be unwise. Still, agreement or not, I wish I had written that.

Thanks to Arthur C. Clarke for Virtual Joy

In an obituary earlier this month, I read that one of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories, “Dial F for Frankenstein,” inspired a British scientist “to invent the World Wide Web in 1989.” This struck me as an unlikely story.

I have no doubt that a Clarke story may have inspired scientist Tim Berners-Lee (hyphenization courtesy of the obit’s author). I just question whether he, or anyone else, can be said to have “invented” the web.

Over the last couple of years, my son Brendan and I have had several conversations about such things. Brendan, now nine years old, has initiated these discussions with the regular claim that Bill Gates invented the internet.

His nearly habitual assertion would launch what became, in repetition, a conversation both tedious and infuriating. It is with some relief that I can say that it has been some time, six weeks or more, since he last made his emphatic Bill Gates claim.

He stopped, I think, because we found a book at the DC public library that helped to ground our discussion. The book, called Cyberspace and written by David Jefferis, is aimed at kids. Jefferis manages to write about the development of the internet without a single reference to Bill Gates.

The internet, it turns out, “developed because of the ‘cold war,’ a power struggle between communist and non-communist countries that lasted from 1945 to 1989.” Defense planners were looking for a way to maintain communications in the event of nuclear attack. They explored a network of connected sites that did not depend on a single hub.

“This first Internet, named the ARAPnet, was set up in the 1960s.” Apparently, it solved the planners’ problem. “From then on, there was no stopping the growth of the Net,” Jefferis wrote.

(It may seem to readers as though I'm not following a strict system for capitalizing words here. But this is the rule I’m following: If I’m quoting someone who capitalizes “internet” or “web,” the capitalization stands. But if I’m using those words to make a point—entirely my own or paraphrased—I’m not capitalizing. I don’t capitalize the word “god,” either. On this point, my Bill Gates/Microsoft-developed Word program disagrees. Word underlines, in red, every instance of my use of “internet” that I don’t capitalize.)

In any case, I used passages from “Cyberspace” to help make the point to Brendan that the development of the internet was a collective achievement. Gates, after all, hadn’t even been born when the cold war began.

Though he’d never been persuaded by me before, the notion that the “military,” another legendary entity in Brendan’s mind, might have a hand in inventing the internet, relieved him greatly and he was able to set aside his faith in the omnipresence of Bill Gates in the history of Everything. (In this paragraph, for reasons unknown to me, Word has begun underlining in green each use of “internet” that I fail to capitalize.)

So, when I read that Berners-Lee had been moved by Clarke’s story to invent the web, I persuaded Brendan to take another trip to the library with me (the Lamond-Riggs branch of DC public.)

Now, as Brendan settles in with a baseball book—“Rookie of the Year”—I have retrieved “Cyberspace” and am consulting it for a bit of info about Tim Berners-Lee. As it turns out, Clarke’s obit writer has not stretched the fabric of truth quite as far as Brendan did in his story of the internet.

There’s a small photo of this guy, Berners-Lee on page 10 of “Cyberspace.” The caption, which has done away with all hyphens, says Lee, “of Switzerland’s CERN laboratory, is thought of as the brains behind the World Wide Web.”

Of course, that achievement has broader roots than Lee’s brain, also. “Cyberspace” says that in 1945 American scientist Vannever Bush “proposed using a ‘memex,’ a machine that [could store] information. [And] lay a trail of related words and pictures.”

Vannever Bush, says the book, “is often called the father of the information age.” Further, writes Jefferis, “the memex was never built, but in 1960, programmer Ted Nelson was inspired by the idea to write the hypertext computer language. This used hyperlinks to take a user on a trail of linked information sources.”

All of this actually suggests that the web and the internet were “born,” ultimately from the fertile partnership of Metaphor and Hyperbole (caps mine), which themselves originated in once both ritualized and spontaneous social, cultural and collective activities like storytelling or, perhaps, originated in the domestications of grains and the brewing of malt beverages some 10,000 years ago.

Personally, I find that my own use of the internet (and my laptop and other related items) is a mixed benefit to me. Just two days ago—ironically or not, the same day I read the Clarke obituary—I composed several clever e-mails to my landlord and to other correspondents. And, even more cleverly, but mistakenly, copied those messages to two of Brendan’s teachers; people who had no interest whatsoever in the content or style of my e-mails about sewers and lunch.

In the process, I discovered that in the wake of the internet and the web, it is possible for me to sit at home, entirely by myself, and use these developments to embarrass myself publicly.

In a final connotative leap, I’d like to volunteer another tidbit from “Cyberspace.” A picture of a young man, posing near two large, now archaic, computers and staring bravely (visionarily?) off into space is captioned this way:

“Ray Tomlinson devised the electronic mail system in the US in 1972. He used the now-universal ‘at’ symbol to show an e-mail address: this person @ that computer.”

It is therefore thanks to Ray, Arthur, Tim, Vannever and countless other less well-known brains, "fathers of," and inventors—me, you, Al Gore, Emma Goldman, and millions of servants, serfs and slaves throughout history—that I can anticipate yet another time in the future when I might sit home by myself and somehow commit one more public faux pas.

It makes me want to both blush and jump for virtual joy.