to neighbors of wadebear, abearsanta, and aynonimowse

DigitalBaggins wrote:
The one and only true good thing about Starbucks free Wi-Fi or McDonald's

The 2 problems with that are:

The nearest ones are miles away - a 15 minute drive at 65 mph.

You have to buy stuff or they'll ask you to leave.

That's why I got the cellular hotspot devices - I figure it would be cheaper than driving into town at least once a day and spending money on overpriced junk food. It may be a week before we get the replacement modem, and even longer before we get it working right.

The first one they sent would work fine for about an hour and a half, then it would start losing connection every couple of minutes. So of course they wanted to try to fix it remotely (you can't fix an overheating problem by fiddling with the settings! And that's obviously what it was since disconnecting it for a couple of hours made it work again for another hour and a half...)

I had a TV like that once. It would work for a while, then the screen would start going on and off. Let it cool down and it would work for a while, then blinky, blinky, blinky. I opened it up and found the bad connection and was able t o re-solder it so it worked for a few more months, then it died.