DSL at home!

Wow! I finally have BellSouth FastAccess DSL at home. I can now play around with the internet at home without having to go out to a coffee shop to get a wireless connection. Going to the coffee shop was fun, and I may still do it occasionally. But it cost money: over two dollars for a large cup of tea, over four for a large but really not-so-large smoothie. So even though DSL costs, it will save me money in the long run over the coffee shop.

I used to have free dialup connection through the University of Memphis when I taught there. They let it stay active for a while after I stopped, but they finally purged the old accounts and I lost the access. Now I'm on again.

The DSL modem came with a setup CD that I was supposed to run on my computer. A friend at work told me to try just hooking the modem up to the computer through an ethernet cable, and it should work out of the box. It did! When I got on Firefox the first time, a page came up asking me to do some kind of configuration on the modem, which I did. It asked me to restart Firefox, and voila! I was on the internet without ever running the startup CD.

My next step will be to get a wireless router and see if I can set up a wireless network including my other computers. This will allow me to use them for something other than expensive doorstops. It will also allow my wife and me to get on the internet at the same time!