Prague Journal

Wednesday, September 8, 2004.

We’ve been here a week already and, except for the internet problems, we are fairly settled. This morning is laundry day. We have very little clothesline space – our balcony is perhaps 14 feet long – and the line hangs low, so I can only hang one small load at a time. But the weather is nice, so things dry rather quickly. I’ll miss these lovely days when the cold weather hits and I have to resort to hanging everything in the bath room.
Most of our day was spent fussing with the internet. We resorted to going to Charles University where Rick has an affiliation. He was there last fall, so he is acquainted with the secretary, Mrs. Polišenska. Rick brought his laptop, hoping to troubleshoot our problems and use their LAN line. We were introduced to the Department Chair who graciously gave Rick a key to the computer lab and directed us to Martin, the systems administrator. I showed Martin our dialup protocols and he could find nothing to suspect a problem. But he did set Rick up with an account on their system and gave us a LAN cable for Rick’s laptop. Voila! Rick was able to access his email through their Ethernet connection, so finally to check mail, and delete the 140 junk-mail messages that had accumulated over the last week. As is always the case, fussing with email made the time fly; we were there for over three hours!
Immediately upon arriving home, we got a call from dear Mrs. Halova. She had spoken with a professional computer technician who offered his services at our flat this evening for 600 Czk ($24). Within the hour this young man, another Martin, arrived at our flat. He also could find nothing wrong with the computer, but suspected a problem with the telephone connection. By disconnecting everything and placing the computer in different places, he was able to diagnose the problem: the transformer that I had used to plug my American computer adapter into the Czech outlet was interfering with the phone transmission. Eliminating the interference by removing the transformer solved everything. We are now connected to the world – at least by dialup. So now I, too, can download my email to my laptop and start to catch up on long-overdue projects and correspondence.
Rick and I went up the street to Na Staré Faře (“At the Old Parsonage”) for dinner to celebrate. We had a lovely Czech meal, with ice cream sundaes for dessert.

posted by JWinn @ 8:37 PM