I am a moron.

[digitalwanderer]

AAARGH!!! You ever help someone out with a problem and you pull a couple of brainfarts that are in hindsight sooo bloody obvious that you want to bang your head into something?
(I don't bang my head on things anymore, I promised my wife...but I WANT to!)

My son's best friends family has become very good friends of ours, and MauiMom signed up to Elite Bastards a while back to learn more about PCs. They had a problem with their phone lines a couple of days ago, here's the story of what happened:

Damned if MM's problem isn't turning out to be a royally weird one. I stopped by the other day to pick up my son and her husband was working on fixing their phone wiring and having some trouble getting the phone outlet in their bedroom to work. (The one they plug their DSL modem into)

I helped him play with it a bit and it looked like he did everything right, but there was still no dial tone on that one outlet. We got their kitchen phone working just spiffy and then decided to call it a day since I was in a hurry and try again the next.

The next day, yesterday, me and the kids went by to play/see if we could get it working. I had brought an old phone to test with and when I plugged it into the phone jack in their bedroom I got nothing, but when I unplugged it from the DSL filter I noticed a peculiar rattle from it. (I got the same DSL service and identical equipment, a nice plus for trouble-shooting)

Unplug DSL filter from jack, plug phone directly into jack, get dial tone. Get another DSL filter (I always wondered why they gave us like a dozen of those things...how many phones do people have?), plug it in, plug phone into DSL filter and get dial tone.

Problem solved, happy-happy.

Just for giggles I plugged the phone into the busted DSL filter's DSL port rather than the phone line, so I figured their DSL was working and the only thing stopping MauiMom from accessing the web was her not trying it and I explain it to her husband and we have ourselves a good old evil chuckle at it as I fire up a browser to make sure their net connection is working...

...'cept it isn't. There's the "cable is not connected" error thingy in the system tray.

15 minutes later of swapping cables around to check them, making sure the network card is in, etc I come to the conclusion that I can't find a damned thing wrong with either the cables or the PC...the bloody thing should work.

Then I look at the router and it looks goofy to me. We have the same DSL/router too (long story, lots of history behind my routers) and when I look over at the kitty's sleeping on mine it doesn't have any red lights on and it's not blinking.

Shit. :?

Just for giggles I run a cable from the PC network card directly to the modem. The PC instantly says "new network connection" and goes chugging uselessly away trying to figure out what kind it is. (This PC has never been set-up to be directly hooked to the DSL modem)

So the PC & modem seem spiffy and the router seems shot. I try resetting the router, no. I take the router home real quick and swap it out with mine and it does the same thing at my place that it did at theirs, then I look up what kind of DSL routers are in stock at the local Circuit City/Best Buy and do a quick print-out and fly back. (MM only lives about 3-4 blocks away)

Explain the situation to MauiMom, tell her she needs a new router and explain that it's pretty easy to set-up since all she really has to do is plug the modem to the WAN and then her PCs to all the other ones and she should be good to go. MM is good with PCs; she's not super knowledgeable about 'em yet, but she's got the curiousity and perserverence to figure out problems on her own which I think is more important so I figure she'll be ok.

I got an e-mail this morning from her. She had to hook her laptop up to her modem to connect to e-mail it and wondered if I could stop by and give her a hand setting it up later as she was having some trouble.

GUILTY CONFESSION:

In typing this I remembered that which I forgot; setting up a new router can be kind of tricky. I totally spaced the router and the modem; for some reason I was thinking all the login info was stored in the modem...but that's all stored in the router and ya gotta set that bit up yourself.

In my own defense, it can be kind of hard to concentrate with 4 kids running around having fun screaming and I tend to be kind of stressed whenever I'm supposed to be keeping an eye on my kids and I'm not...but I really feel like an idiot for the two brainfart mistakes I made on this one. (Not checking the outlet directly and testing the DSL filter only and telling MM that setting up a router was just plugging it in. )

Sorry MM, we'll have you and the family back online today. It's entirely my bad for no internet for ya this morning and you have my apologies.

I don't think I'll be living this one down anytime soon, freaking MauiMom is too bright now about PCs not to catch my goof-ups.

Not my proudest geek moment, but I figured it'd be fun to have a best goofs thread and the only way to get those started is to post up one.

 

[Captain Chickenpants]

Way back in the day, we had an old 386 with two 20MB (yes MB) harddrives. We had started getting bad sectors so decided that it would be worth doing a low level format to get them flagged.

I used XTreePro to zip up the contents of the two harddrives so that they would fit on one drive whilst the other got formatted, copy data to other hardrive and repeat. I got the two drives formatted and came to decompress the contents of the drives, only to discover I had zipped up our only copy of XtreePro, and although it uses pkzip to do the zipping there was something about they way it did it that meant I couldn't unzip it with pkzip.

CC

 

[MasterBaiter]

"I am a moron."

Nah... Village Idiot still fits pretty well.

Everybody makes mistakes from time to time. As long as you don't consitantly screw the pooch I would say all is good in the world. Everyone is entitled to a brain-fart every blue moon.