so, remember the part where i ordered dsl, and it was totally easy, and i was in disbelief that it was going to all come off without a fuss?

i was sorta right…

i finally managed to excavate enough boxes to get access to my desk today, and get the computer set up, and the wireless, and so forth. i plugged everything in and the computer happily rejoined my wireless network, and that’s the point where i went to go reconfigure the access point away from my old static ip ethernet configuration over to bog-standard PPPoE, and i realized that although my dsl seemed to be live, i had blinky lights and everything, but i’d forgotten to get my username and password from the sales agent on the phone. oops.

after sulking about it for a while, and trying all of the rather a lot of wireless networks i have within range all the way up here (seriously. there are like a dozen “linksysNNN” networks alone) and finding not one individual trusting enough to let me mooch bits from, i decided that… i would try the last username and password i had for sbc PPPoE dsl, and rely on basic ISP account maintenance incompetence to have prevented them from ever having purged that long-cancelled account from the authentication servers, and see if that worked. keep in mind, the last time i had sbc PPPoE dsl was when i lived in hyde park, which was before i lived in printer’s row last time, which puts it at about 4 years ago. it worked great! hooray for basic ISP account maintenance incompetence, the one thing that is universal through all providers everywhere!