…. and the rest of the family depends on me.

Our internet connection died Thursday night. Swapping cables and routers (Of course I have extras lying around. Doesn’t everybody :-)> ) convinced me that the problem was the cable modem, for which I did not have a spare. Got one Friday morning and installed it that afternoon. Couldn’t get that to work, and had to call Comcast Tech support. The rep there reminded me that I had to register the modem’s MAC address with them, so I would have had to call them anyway. After taking care of that things went OK, except that I could not get the wireless connection to work. May be a hardware issue with the router there–James (#1 son) had been having trouble with that anyway. I got a non-wireless router to work, and added another 5 port switch. That way there is an ethernet connection for James. Not as convenient as wireless, but it works. May try to reestablish wireless later, but am not sure I want to deal with the security issues. For now, mia_mcdavid, James, and I have our connections back.

BTW, the Comcast Rep was very good. It helped that I knew the right things to say (having been on the other end of many such conversations).