Living out in the suburbs of nowhere, it's pretty much impossible to get many of the same services that people in the "Big City" take for granted. Being semi-geeky, The most notable of these for me is broadband internet access.

The low population density makes it economically unfeasible for the cable company to hang fiber out that far and for the Telco to put a DSL repeater twixt us and them. So my only option is satellite.

Now that the house is done, we decided that we needed to get hooked back up to the net and, since we have decided not to have a land line phone (another saga in itself), we signed up for satellite.

After much waiting (the equipment was on backorder for about a month after we ordered it) we finally scheduled our installation for this weekend. Sure enough, the rep showed up Saturday morning and installed it all. No problem.

Until we actually went to use it, that is. After setting up the browsers (IE & Firefox) to use the proxy server, they worked fine. Then I headed for the email clients. No go. I could ping the mail server, so communication was there, but it just wouldn't hook up using SMTP. At least, that's my take on it. Then I tried PuTTY. Also no go. I tired a number of things. MS Money connected to look for updates but I imagine it uses IE's settings. The only other software I could get to connect was Trillian, which is my IM client of choice. I have no idea what transport protocol IM uses so I honestly don't why it worked. I wasn't expecting it to.

At this point, I had to take my daughter to her swim lesson and left the installer/rep to do some research. When I got back, he was gone and I had no connection. He's supposed to talk to someone today who is supposed the Mahareeshi Mahesh Yogi of satellite internet setup. We'll see.

To his credit, he wouldn't take a check until we know it's going to work for us. Frankly, if I can't connect for email & ssh, it's of no use to me.

I'm pretty cheesed about the whole thing. Updates as they come in.