I made it to my parents’ in Fairfield, CA, from home in Arlington, MA, yesterday, pretty low in sleep, and faced the crucial situation of getting my MacBook to feed off their internet connectivity. I had acquired an Airport Express with the intention of setting up a wireless connection; to date, this has not worked. Consequently, I’ve hijacked their connection and just plugged my laptop into their modem, which didn’t work last night, either. I went to bed quite vexed and despairing in the way only IT issues can leave me.
Got up this morning, did some calmer troubleshooting, feeding in of DNS numbers, and rebooted their modem, with success. Still want to set up the Airport base station, though. Not good to hijack their connection.
Bliss continued when I saw their download speed is 2.5 times faster than my home connection, so Ubuntu was mine in about 25 minutes total.
Following directions to make mistakes, I accidentally chose the 64-bit download of Ubuntu server which I only discovered when I went to compare the MD5 hash and it was wrong, wrong, wrong. Correct download has been made and the hash is correct.
It really is useful to make mistakes and encounter mysteries, though my problem-solving abilities are nowhere near what they need to be to cut down on flailing. Always I flail. Solving IT problems to me often seems to be about sequencing; it’s not that you’re taking the wrong steps, you’re just doing them in the wrong order so they take no effect or screw something else up, and pretty soon you, meaning I, am in a swamp of despair.
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