Viraj's Weblog

I did alot of unpacking today. I think I have more packing material than actual stuff. Slowly but surely my apartment is becoming a home. What sucked is they were doing some plumbing in my building and the water was off all day.

I have a plasma TV that was crated before being moved. A 3rd party had to come out to open the crate, and I also had Comcast coming out the same day. I was worried that I wouldn't have the TV ready before Comcast got here. Luckily the 'uncraters' came out to open the crate early. Then Comcast came out to hook up my cable TV and internet. The TV worked great, and I was given a cable modem self-install kit. After drueling over Discovery HD a bit, I ventured to get my internet access running.

Now I have a wireless router, but I couldn't hook that up to the modem because some software is required to run to setup the cable modem. I hate installing this crap on my system, so I tried just connecting my laptop to the modem and tried to browse. It redirected to a Comcast page requesting me to download the installation software. They had a Mac version, and it was like 64megs. What in the world is included in that setup?

After downloading the HQX file and running it, it starts up Internet Explorer for Mac and begins a setup process. My guess is the download included IE, because the setup was just a sequence of web pages. After putting in my account number it got to a screen and just hung. I killed IE and restarted the installation, which seemed to continue where it left off. Finally it told me to reboot. Hmm, I haven't rebooted my Mac since, well since I don't know when. This brought me horror flashbacks of Windows, but I complied.

The system comes up and I notice I have a different IP. However, I cannot access anything. DNS seems to work, but port 80 connections to anywhere fail. I tried running the setup again, but it just crashes with 'file not found'. Yay. Now I was about to call them and then thought to myself, what would they probably ask me to do? I remembered my past experiences with Adelphia, "Power down the modem...". Ok, I'll try power cycling the modem. Voila! It works.

Now I'm not going to work with my laptop connected to the modem, I need to setup my wireless router. Hm, they probably know my MAC address now and will prevent any other MAC from connecting. I don't know this for sure, but it's a safe assumption. So I went to my router setup and configured the MAC address cloning feature to be the same MAC as my Mac . Plugged the router into the modem, and voila, I instantly have wireless.

So in general it was a pretty good day. I'm even getting my car delivered tomorrow! I'm really impressed with how smoothly this whole move is going. Everything is being done earlier than I expected and things just seem to work out.