Problem (not quite) Fixed

Hi All,

Thanks so much for all your well-wishes and suggestions on the proxy servers.  I really appreciate your help and concern. 

So here’s what happened yesterday!

We had a house full of kids and family here yesterday… and I mean a house FULL!  The noise level was somewhere between major irritating and painful for most of the afternoon.  I’m afraid I reached the 60 year mark a few months ago and at my age I seem to be having more and more of a problem with that kind of thing.  When you’re young you want everything to be noisy and exciting.  At my age, you just want everything to be QUIET!

So anyway, in the middle of all that turmoil, our phone rang… and I answered it.  Nobody on the other end.  A short while later, it rang again – and again nobody there.  Then my cell phone rang.  This time, someone was there.  Hughes Net.  Did I mention I’m not as young as I used to be?  I can hear much better on the house phone than on my cell phone, but for some reason, the connection wasn’t going fully through on the house phone.  Anyway, I banned everyone from using the internet while I dashed upstairs to my office and my old ancient computer that has long been working on its third hard drive.  And I closed the door.

I had a very hard time hearing and especially understanding the very nice woman who called to help with my problem.  I don’t know where she was from, but I’m guessing India (maybe that’s why the calls didn’t go through on my house phone).  Anyway, we spent over an hour on that phone call redoing all the little tests I had done already.  No the browser doesn’t make a difference… I have three on my computer at home and five on my work computer.  No, I still can’t ping it.  No, hard wiring the computer to the modem and bypassing the wireless router doesn’t help either.  And on, and on, and on. 

Finally, after over an hour of this, she had me log into the modem.  Hughes Net by the way has a great display page from the modem’s IP address that tells how much data usage you’ve used and still have available for the month.  Anyway, what I never saw on that page, was a tiny little nearly invisible icon.  In fact, it’s nearly so invisible, that I had trouble seeing it when she told me where to look for it.  Did I mention I’m getting old and my eyes aren’t what they used to be? 

So I clicked on the icon… and low and behold… it opened up another web page – full of controls that nobody knows are there.  And among those controls is one to turn the web accelerator on or off.  She had me turn the thing off and then try to get to Fictionmania.  Bang!  I got there almost instantly!

So the problem lies in the web accelerator!  So now I’m supposed to leave it on for everything else I do, and only turn it off when I go to Fictionmania.  But hey, that’s like not a major problem. 

And in the meantime, she’s escalating the cause of the problem to another level of tech support – who are supposed to call me (hopefully not my wife) next week some time.

So the end result… so far, so good.  But this battle isn’t over yet!  But at least I can now upload my stories and read all the critiques from home.  And yes, I do read every single comment about my stories!

So thank you all for your concern and help.

Have a super duper wonderful great day!

Karen