So I call them up, somewhat reluctantly (I’m still used to Bell’s tech support. Sue me.), and turns out it’s a known issue with the modem that when powercycled, it loses the configuration settings and needs to be set up again. Well fuck, again. At least these guys have a clue what they’re talking about, anyway. About 20 minutes later on my slower than the second coming laptop, we had us a newly reconfigured modem. Another 30 seconds and I was back online. For… 45 minutes. Further investigation revealed it had decided, yet again, to forget my settings. And this time it wasn’t because I powercycled. Well fuck, and fuck again. I didn’t wanna do anything productive tonight anyway.
So while on the phone with someone because, well, I likes me some damn good conversation and she usually provides an awesome one, we get to talking about music. It gets to a song she hasn’t heard that I figure she’ll find absofuckinglutely hillarious, and then I’m reminded. Duh, moron, you can has no internets. Which meant another 20 minutes because, to demonstrate my utter lack of preparedness for chrisis situations, I’d turned off my slow as hell laptop in favour of the much faster beast in the living room, which I’m using now, and which is conveniently nowhere in ethernet cable range of the craptastical modem. Clearly I was on some serious crack when I planned the layout of this network. Needless to say it managed to be fixed a second time, and it *looks* like the temporary bout of amnesia we were fighting has apparently subsided. Or at least has gone on a hopefully permanent vacation. I did learn something from all this, though. Speedtouch modems, or at least ones of this particular model, are absolute crap, and should be set on fire. *After* a suitable replacement is located.