Fizzle Fizzle Pop

Our weekly WoW runs are still going well, although we're having to deal with the occasional evening where people need to take time off for work, holidays and random attacks by ninjas. Last night was pretty much a wash though, as the house ADSL connection decided to die sometime in the afternoon. Rafe went on a desperate mission to find a replacement modem last night, hoping that some store in Sydney would still be open and sell a modem that would save us. Since it was a Wednesday night, pretty much everything was shut apart from K-Mart, who on the phone assured us that they had a wide range of ADSL modems, but had nothing of the sort when Rafe arrived at their location. Many K-Mart employees nearly lost their lives or were seriously maimed at that particular moment.

Even though we couldn't find a replacement modem, we managed to get online using some blessed fool's unsecured wifi connection. It ran beautifully for several hours, with our WoW group chatting on Teamspeak and exploring quite a bit of Gnomeragen before our benefactor decided that it was bedtime and turned their connection off. Ah well, at least we got some entertainment in for the evening.

We're fairly sure it's the Netcomm NB5 ADSL modem itself, since its logs show that it really can't hold a connection. We have pages and pages of connections lasting for 35 seconds, which is a slightly odd number, but is probably related to something or other. Looking further back in the logs shows that we've been experiencing these dropouts for a while now, but with increasingly frequency that eventually became all-encompassing last night. I had previously attributed the slowdowns to IPrimus' crappy network, but it was probably (hopefully) the modem, its digital heart spasming and skipping beats on its way to a final, fatal cardiac arrest.

Update: Rafe bought a replacement modem and we are once again connected to the worldwide cybernetic teat.