Argh!

Okay, when I do manage to get connected, my connection speeds are such that it takes literally five minutes for me to see the LJ update page. Obviously, this is not terribly useful as an internet connection.

Spent too much time yesterday talking with some nice guys at AOL tech support who, after running me through various things they thought might be helpful, gave up and said the problem isn't on their end and isn't with their software. I've run week-old versions of McAfee, Spybot S&D, and Ad-Aware (obviously can't download the latest updates of any of these); uninstalled and reinstalled AOL; reinstalled modem drivers; run scandisk & defrag; unplugged and replugged whatever I could without actually taking the computer apart; emptied my cache* and history and eaten all my cookies; done other things tech support suggested which I've since forgotten; and weeped and wailed and gnashed my teeth. So, can any of you guys think of what might be wrong here? I mean, aside from the fact that I use "AOHell" 9.0 to connect to the internet. Is the next step to physically check the modem to see if there are dead bugs in it or something?

I'll probably check e-mail from the library today or tomorrow (or both). In the meantime, if you have my phone number(s), feel free to call if you want to tell me something. The cell phone is a better choice than the landline, since I'll probably keep beating my head against the wall trying to get a decent connection from home.

~~~~~

In other news: My skin no longer feels like it's burning, which is quite a relief. My canned food stocks are running low. The Social Security caseworker assigned to me told me on Friday that my file is one of her top priorities, which is very nice but I'm not sure it means much. And MegaHAL says:

Women have no features.
they press hip to hip,
each of us will have to imagine this: you,
after your bath, crosslegged on the telephone wires
on the sun-drenched roadside, from the peak of life
as ice storms do. Often you must always be;
home is the only one.

After checking my face in the mirror, I believe MegaHAL is wrong about women. This does not make him unique among poets.

Snow white, the footprints, the inevitable
blood. The dead thing, the
ovum starts to sneeze,
you will see,
who countest the steps with my usual daydreams here too,
but was in the light. In one of my step,
yet steadfast to thy parapets,
tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
a very poor bargain
she'd surely make."

so she tried to be enough time
to pass the time of year.

* I originally typoed this as "cash." I could not bear to live the line as it was, so I wasted several more minutes of my life waiting for the edit page to load in order to correct the spelling of that one word. This probably tells you more about me than you want to know. **

** ::headdesk::

Wow.

So, opening up the computer, gazing upon the modem wondering how the heck I could tell if there were anything physically wrong with it, putting the computer back together again, banging on it (accidentally, mostly) in the process, didn't actually mean that I could connect to the internet on the first try, yet it did mean that my eventual connection would be amazingly, incredibly, or at least significantly faster than it has been since Friday night. Nifty! Of course, with life being full of tradeoffs, the left-hand mouse button is now working erratically.

In the process, I realized once again that I really do need to spend less of my upright-and-functioning time in this chair and more of it cleaning the rest of my room. The depletion of my food supply does have one good side effect--it will be much easier to clean in here without boxes and bags full of cans and boxes in the way.

Wow. It's still not as fast as it should be, and that part where it doesn't want to connect properly on the first go bothers me. But still, a web page loading in under a minute. Such luxury!