So, I am sure everyone I know would be happy to confirm that I am a calm, peace loving fellow. A guy who thinks only good thoughts about those around him and someone who only sees the best in his fellow man. Well today I will be slightly out of character then as I have no choice but to have an angry rant about my current nemesis:
We recently succumbed to advertising and signed up for the T-online "Call and Surf Comfort" package which has been rammed down our throats from every media source in Germany for the past months. It seems like an OK package, Phone + DSL flatrate for about 50 Euro per month.
We signed up and the nice wireless router arrived in the mail with all the cables and such:
I plugged it all in to the phone splitter, then to the LAN card on our PC, flipped the big switch and... nothing. My first instinct was that I connected something incorrectly as my reading of German manuals is a bit suspect.
So I went and enlisted my native speaking helper, who according to a quiz in "Freundin" Magazine is technically minded:
Claudia read through the book with me and confirmed that had indeed connected it all correctly. We double and triple checked, then consulted the troubleshooting section of the book to decipher the blinking lights. it seemed that the light meaning "DSL Connection not available" was blinking, so Claudia placed a call to T-Online to inquire. The help people confirmed that our DSL service had not been switched on, which was odd, since we paid for Nov 1 connection and at this point it was Nov 12. Anyway, it was after hours, so they could not do anything and we would have to wait for the next day.
Several days and several phone calls later, the DSL was still not going. Claudia was getting more and more angry with T-online and we had no internet in my house.
I was telling this story to my work colleagues, and a guy in my group, mentioned that it took T-online "about 2 months to get his DSL running." oh no...
But that evening SUCCESS! The light was not blinking! I quickly jumped on the PC and set up the account.... SUCCESS! DSL worked, Firefox was browsing away at lightning fast DSL speeds. I set up our firewall, virus, spyware software and then configured Claudia's email account. Everything was going fine. Then it was a bit late so off to bed.
Next day... DSL not working.... Light Blinking... damn... Claudia back on the phone to T-online and the person there actually said "Oh, I see from your file that this is your 12th call on this topic." For reference, that is not the best way to endear yourself to my wife. Claudia had a short nasty conversation with them.
Next day SUCCESS! DSL! one day following... BLINK BLINK BLINK. no DSL. Phone call #13.
Today T-online is sending a technician to our place to see what the problem could be. The house we currently live in is only 7 years old, so it is not like the wiring is likely to be the problem.
The best part is, we will move in spring and have to get DSL connected at the new house! Hooray for reliving the adventure!
And inside here is a look at the Kitchen area (left) and a tiny bit of the living room (right) I am standing where the dinign table will go.
And here is a view of the Liam's room. I am actually standing in the next room and a dividing wall will still go up, between the two big windows, making it two rooms.
And this is what Liam does when everyone else is walking through the house taking pictures:
Most of the photos of the ship that I took were taken at night. This is due to the fact that we had a pretty full working schedule and any free time I had was from about 10pm onwards. It does look pretty nice at night, but I think almost anything would look good from far away on a foggy night when illuminated with coloured lights. Even Orangeville.
We recently succumbed to advertising and signed up for the T-online "Call and Surf Comfort" package which has been rammed down our throats from every media source in Germany for the past months. It seems like an OK package, Phone + DSL flatrate for about 50 Euro per month.
I plugged it all in to the phone splitter, then to the LAN card on our PC, flipped the big switch and... nothing. My first instinct was that I connected something incorrectly as my reading of German manuals is a bit suspect.
Claudia read through the book with me and confirmed that had indeed connected it all correctly. We double and triple checked, then consulted the troubleshooting section of the book to decipher the blinking lights. it seemed that the light meaning "DSL Connection not available" was blinking, so Claudia placed a call to T-Online to inquire. The help people confirmed that our DSL service had not been switched on, which was odd, since we paid for Nov 1 connection and at this point it was Nov 12. Anyway, it was after hours, so they could not do anything and we would have to wait for the next day.
I am always delighted with the way you can take the train as the final leg of your flight ticket to Stuttgart. They send your bags on to the Stuttgart train station and they are generally waiting for you when you go down to the little room to get them. no lines, no problem. Same goes for the other direction, it is awesome to go into the Lufthansa room and check in your bags and get your boarding pass with virtually no waiting. It is soooo much better than the hell of airport waiting. Also, since most international flights are departing from Frankfurt or Munich anyway, it is much nicer to have a train ride to these places instead of a ridiculous 20 min flight. The train takes about 60 min, but when you factor in the line waiting and security checks, it generally works out being faster than getting on two planes.
My next stop was Chicago O'Hare, and it was my first visit to this mighty hub. One of the first things I saw after disembarking was a Dinosaur skeleton. rather odd:
I had about 3.5 hours to kill here and I was fairly hungry for lunch, so I got to sample yet more airport food. O'Hare has a lot of food outlets, but they are basically the same ones repeated every 5 metres or so. McDonald's, Quizno's, Regio's Pizza, and Starbucks. I went for a mini deep dish pizza since that is what Chicago is famous for. It was decent, but not the best I have had. Call me a heretic, but I liked Pizza hut better for deep dish, and I prefer the super thin crust pizza better in general. Perhaps I am too long in Europe, where there are all sorts of odd pizzas. Yesterday my cafeteria had pizza with sliced boiled egg on top. I did not go for that one.
From there I had to walk down a very very long hall. Thankfully there were lots of people moving conveyor belts, specially manufactured to move the extra large north american sized bottoms from one side of the terminal to the other.
As I recall, this airport had a reasonably good choice of places to get snacks and kill time. I had about 2.5 hours here and I believe I had a slice of pizza for dinner. There was no food on the stinking plane since it was only 3.5 hour flight. Jerks.
Next I landed in Zurich, which is one of the nicest airports ever, I don't know of another that looks quite as posh as this one. The picture does not really do it justice, but it is an airport that looks like they just unwrapped it and took it out of the box, full of gleaming black marble and well dressed people offering you swiss chocolate and enormously inflated prices.
After spending some quality time strolling around waiting for my flight, I headed over to my Air Canada limo. Quality of Air Canada has gone pretty far down if you ask me. The food was disastrously bad for dinner (although the pizza snack later was great.) Space was cramped and I generally had a pretty bad time. The only saving grace was that the plane was half empty and I was not surrounded by fat sweaty people.
