A cautionary tale

23rd & 24th July

It's been a couple of days largely dominated by anxiety about internet access. As I've said before, the Burton area isn't great for connectivity but yesterday morning at Branston things became disastrously worse.

We were tied right outside the entrance to the water park, where the signal is weaker than at our previous location through the bridge, but this time when I tried to connect the modem, the laptop refused to believe that it was there at all. Over the next thirty-six hours a number of strategies were tried to recover the situation. The simplest, such as unplugging and reconnecting the modem and restarting the laptop, were used from time to time amongst more sophisticated strategies such as fixing disc permissions and transferring the SIM card to a phone handset to try to find a better signal.

All of these had only transient success.

In amongst this, we found time to have another chat with Tony and Chris on Louisiana II and to walk through to Branston village in search of supplies. This last was not much more successful than the internet efforts. The shop in Branston is essentially a newsagent with some basic groceries and we only succeeded in obtaining a copy of The Independent.

By the afternoon, Sheila was showing understandable signs of mutiny in view of my continued muttering, pacing about and demonstrating all the other symptoms of a stymied geek.

We therefore set out for a walk, and had made it as far as the Ice Cream Boat at the end of the moorings when it became clear that it was about to tip it down. We therefore bought ice creams and retreated to Sanity once more. After the shower (one of the heavy and prolonged ones) had worked its way through, we did manage to find a nice two mile walk around the lakes on the offside of the canal about which we had been told by Tony.

The modem remaining intransigent, I had a go at putting the SIM card back in the phone handset and using it as a Bluetooth modem. This too was unsuccessful, although that was more to do with my rustiness at configuring the phone than anything else.

We therefore abandoned the internet for the day, having decided to take the modem into the T-mobile shop here in Burton today.

This morning it connected without trouble for a time, but after we had boated through to Morrison's it had stopped working again. Having done our shopping, we came on to Shobnall for diesel and a pump out and have tied outside the marina for the night.

The process of backing out of the marina entrance and turning to go onto the moorings was completed just in time, as immediately afterwards we were treated to the sight of a boat trying to leave the marina, a privateer approaching from Branston and a Shakespeare hire boat coming through the bridge in the other direction all at the same time.

It's good to be able to report that everyone remained good tempered during the ensuing confusion, although it was clear that no one could understand the hand signals that any of the others were making.

Back on the boat after having settled the bill in the marina, it occurred to me to try changing the connecting lead between the modem and the laptop – and all was well.

The moral of the story is, when tracing a fault, especially an intermittent one, always start with the plug and lead.

This afternoon we've had a walk into Burton, and checked out the options for Pay As You Go mobile broadband with either 3 or Orange as a backstop for internet access. It's clear though that the price structures are such that it can't be made to work economically, though it is certainly an option for when the T-mobile contract runs out next spring.

As I've said, we'll stay here tonight for our optician's appointments tomorrow morning, and then probably go back towards Branston for the night.