Monday 8 August 2011

I love the internet


Our family got Unifi a couple of months ago and just like with all the other internet service providers before this, the modem had to be placed at the corner of the house which was where the home office was because the desktop was in there. As a result, the Wi-Fi network coverage didn’t quite reach all four corners of the house.

This is fine for me because my room’s directly a floor above the home office but beyond the dining hall and my brother’s room, the house gets zero coverage! This of course will not do for my dad since he has an iPad and he can’t surf in the living room. Him being the man of the house (until I move out to my own place *shakes fist*) means that I have to settle this problem for him.

I thought, won’t it be great if there’s a device that extends the wireless range of your network? I’m not the geekiest of tech geeks so I wasn’t sure. Here’s where I start to really be appreciative of the internet and the ease of information sharing. 5 minutes on Google and I knew exactly what I was supposed to look for: a wireless range extender (of course), the normal price range and the most value-for-money brand.

So I bought what I needed and brought it home. Then I realized I didn’t know how to set up the damned thing. All the stuff about static IPs and default gateways might as well have been Arabic to me. Not to worry, fired up the laptop, typed the appropriate keywords into Google and BAM! detailed instructions from a Forum Lowyat thread from someone who had the same problem.

All these would not have been possible even a decade ago. I would have struggled with the manual for the entire night and called my techie friends the next morning. These days, with the proliferation of internet forums and the increase in volume of tech-tards on the internet asking for advice, you can be almost certain that if you have a problem, somebody has already asked about it first on the internet. Obviously, this is not applicable for all cases, especially not to the first person who asked it on the internet obviously, but in 95% of the cases, just look it up on Google!


It really bears repeating: I fucking love the internet!