The wonder of the internets

Dear readers,

I am happy to tell you that I have finally managed to get my DSL hooked up so I can now communicate with the outside world for more than 30 seconds at a time. This is actually a fairly significant victory in a week full of setbacks. My modem arrived at the post office on Monday and I had to wait in line for nearly an hour there just to get it, and I came home to install it, and of course it didn't work. The installation CD would only get through the first two steps and then I would get a message pop up that my computer did not recognize the files.

This was disappointing as I was always under the impression that Macs were magical machines that could magically make everything work without a lot of effort on my part. So I gave up for a few days, but came home from the archive yesterday determined to prevail! I unplugged and replugged everything and still nothing. Then I got onto a very unstable wireless network to read some Mac message boards in French where several solutions were suggested. The easiest was just to change ethernet cables since the one that comes with the modem is apparently crap. So I did that and lo and behold it magically worked!!! Yay!!! I love my pretty little Macbook.

This then allowed me to iChat with both of my sisters about what I was having for dinner, and then talk to Aaron on Skype for an hour about the new Radiohead album and the sexually suggestive M&Ms commercials* on television. So far I have not done any work or research, but I'm sure that someday I will.

I am going shopping today to see how long it can take me to spend 100 Euros. Probably not long if I buy books, but I also need some clothes so we shall see. I shall also try to remember to take some photos of the city to share with you all.

* This M&Ms commercial featured a regular M&M, a peanut M&M and several humans playing strip poker and when the peanut M&M lost the hand, he was ordered to undress whereby he said "yes but I don't really want to show my nuts in front of the ladies." (and I thought M&Ms were such a wholesome, puritanical chocolate candy!)