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Note to self: The internet is a good thing, but it's not the only good thing

One day at home without the internet -- Friday -- brought out the worst in me. I never realized quite how addicted I am.

When I'm on vacation, I'm fine without internet access. But sitting at home without the ability to check mail, or surf random web sites, I quickly started to go nuts. I felt completely isolated from the world. This is not healthy, but the internet really is my connection to people. I am not much of a phone person. And since I don't go into an office every day anymore, I don't get a lot of facetime with, well, anyone.

I finally gave up on my troubleshooting efforts and called Comcast tech support. (And while I was on hold, I found myself itching to click on a few web sites -- DOH! -- what did I say about addiction?) They basically went through all the steps I had done myself: checking connections, recycling the cable modem and router, etc. On about the fifth modem reboot, we got the internet working without the router (thus no wifi, but that's my problem, not theirs), so I hung up. I spent another five or so tedious hours getting the internet to work through the router and thereby spread its love wirelessly around our apartment.

(For those who care, the solution was to hard-reset and recycle the modem and router in the correct order, plugged into the right holes at the right time. These are things I thought I already knew; I never realized just how finicky the damn modem is.) (And then of course I had to completely re-configure the somewhat complicated wifi security, because when I tried to reload the saved configuration, it didn't work.) (Too much detail, sorry.)

And then I could finally relax and go to bed.

I got up at 0-dark-thirty the next morning to do local century ride. OK, well, I did the metric century: 100k, or 60-something miles. It was a beautiful, sunny ride with wonderful training partners. I even ran into my friend Tracy at an aid station, and after registering our surprise at seeing each other, we figured out that we're training for the same half-ironman.

The next day I did a lovely two-hour run and saw no fewer than three people I know along the Ocean Beach path, all within a span of five minutes. For a weekend, it felt like the world was full of friends, and that was super-cool.

July 2, 2007 11:15 PM