January 14, 2009

English Help with an Unexpected Accent

So the internet guy finally came by. He did something that took only a minute and left without a word of instruction. Oh well, says I and I tries to connect me nets.
No dice. For one thing, OS X conspires against me at every turn. It tries to use old passwords, and doesn't let me delete things from the key chain (I just deny it's requests when I can). It also changes locked internet settings. Anyways, I had to call the KDDI service center (they didn't wait to see if I could understand Japanese, and transferred me right to the English center, which seemed to be staffed by an Indian woman), then the Mac English service center (only nihonjins there), then the KDDI center again. This time I got a young man with a hispanic accent. After trying everything, he told me to look at my router. It was blinking. That is no good, apparently. He said something odd about the internet being installed just that day, so I had to wait. That line is still blinking. Incidentally, I can send pings to an ISP, but not any websites. And the Mac thinks the internet is working at times, but won't connect.
If anybody else has had an experience of waiting for the stars to align before being able to connect for the first time in Japan, let me know. As it is, I am wondering why I need the internet at all. I've gone six months without it, and the only thing I've missed was emails and being able to use online Japanese dictionaries, ALC, etc. I could just set up filters to forward certain emails to my cell, so why bother with the net? I should be studying anyways...

Well, I say that, but I still crave my net fix.

3 comments:

  1. Did your internets come with a CD-ROM? I use NTT Flets and needed to run the CD-ROM install before my internets connected. Unfortunately, the program was windows only. Fortunately in addition to my PowerBook, I also had a windows laptop to run the install.

    Maybe the dude that installed your internets saw your mac, saw that you were a white dude, and got the hell out asap ;-)

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  2. Get a wireless router, set that up to connect to the Internet then set up your Mac.

    My brother-in-law uses a PC.

    Last year I was totally unable to get online with my laptop Windows PC as he only had a wired router. We simply couldn't get the connection set up properly.

    This year, we got my Macbook online in a couple of minutes and I was able to set up my DS Lite very easily too.

    Sadly, Tokyo is very short of public access WiFi hotspots.

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  3. We bought a spiffy new wireless router, and I can't get my PowerBook to connect to it wirelessly....Apparently it'll cost some obscene amount of money to have a tech guy come out and help me figure out what's wrong with the password entry, so I still have to drag this thing around the house with its umbilical cord attached. ;)

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