Digital Trauma

I am so glad for the lull in work. I was expecting a really laid back Christmas holiday season but it was not meant to be.

A couple of weeks back my O2 XDA died on me. It was just dead. Trying to keep in contact and organised, I decided to buy an O2 Atom exec. I wanted the built in wi-fi. Dang, the Atom Exec started working up, and had to be put into the service centre for 3 days. :( In the mean time I went and got a cheap Nokia without a camera. I had to get it anyway because I have reservists end of January and I need a phone without camera. But I had to sync all my information from my laptop to my Atom a couple of times this week. I also sent in my old PDA to find out what happened to it.

Then my DVD player has been acting up for several months now. I went and bought a lens cleaner and it did not help. I brought the DVD player down to the service centre and was told that it would cost $40 for any servicing done. I decided to go buy a new DVD player, a Philips one, for $89. The cost between servicing and new things does not make sense nowadays. The best part is that when I got back with the new DVD player, the tray would not open. I had to go back to the shop to get a one to one exchange. What a waste of time.

Then my network router and modem decided to die on me. This is happening about once a year. I decided to buy an all in one from Netgear. The Linksys and D-Link equipment that I have bought before was really not user friendly. I bought a ADSL modem, router and wireless set at Funan. The salesman told me that all the boxes are about the same and we should not have the boxes on 24/7, they overheat and get spoilt. :( Wow, the high standard of workmanship nowadays is astounding.

Anyway, I got the Netgear box back to the office and it took me a couple of hours to set it up. It could have been much faster if the ease set-up wizard had not kept detecting the wrong settings for the ADSL service. I kept ending up at a page to enter a fixed ip address. I rang up Singtel and the only help I got was that Singtel does not have fixe ip addresses. Ahhh... yeah... thank you very much. And once the easy setup wizard started going I kept getting back to it in spite of the many things I tried. But I finally found the button to let me configure the Router manually, it took me all of 5 minutes. The easy setup wizard took me an hour and a half and got me nowhere. And yes, the Netgear Service Centre number for Singapore simply does not work.

I now have the internet and office network back up and working. My old D-link router used to have a print server. The new one from netgear does not. I wanted to buy an add on network print server, but was dissuaded by the salesman in Funan. He told me that in 90% of cases, there were issues and he does not want to be responsible if it did not work in my office. I understand where he is coming from. I have now got to find a way to share the printer in my office.

And with all this configuration and crazy stuff going on, the internet is hammered by the loss of undersea cables in Taiwan. I just cannot get the information I need. :(

Man, I need a holiday from my holiday.