Hahaha! Internet access at last

OK, some of you might have known what has been going on here but here's the press release/blog update. Our 1-year internet contract with the provider ended, and was not automatically renewed, nor did we know it needed to be renewed so our internet access went down. This affected the American phone line as well, so for those of you who have been trying to call us, now you know why you haven't been able to get through. In any case, because it went down we now have to sign back up as new customers which necessitates an activation period, etc etc etc. To summarize, we have been without internet access for 5 days already. This proved to be quite an inconvenience, and after hearing that the outage is supposed to last another 5 days we took action. The idea was to siphon off a connection from our neighbor's house. Our neighbor Egon's internet functions just fine but his wireless signal is not strong enough to reach our house.

First step was to establish "command central" (hehehe) where Dad networked all the computers to function on Egon's network.


Next we got a cable and ran it from his router to his balcony so that it could broadcast a signal to our house. Here's a picture of Egon running the cable.


Next step was attaching the router to the window grating over the balcony with a bungee cord. If you look inside the red circle you'll see it.


Would it work? Yes it did! So we now have at least internet access back. The American phone doesn't work because that's another operation but if you want to reach us via email we're back up and running, at least temporarily until our normal service is restored. The only bonus is that for new customers there is a special of 2 months free service so we won't be paying for the next two months since technically we're "new" customers.