Underway

First day on the road we crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls on The Peace Bridge and stopped for the evening at The Holiday Inn in Burlington, Ontario.  Just nice to have a place to lay our heads after a long day on the road.

Chris and I were up early and managed some uncharacteristic exercise in the morning.  Chris went for a swim and I ran on the tread mill.  Later we played tennis and, when Kevie got up, she and I played ping pong.

Figured we had another 3.5 hours on the road to get to the cottage at The Bruce so we took time to check out the Huron lake front.  The picture is of Chris and I at the waterfront park in Burlington.

Stocked up on some goodies to share when we got to the cottage.  Got some bread from the bakery and an 8 pack mix/match beers (interesting concept) at the state run liquor store - LCBO.

The Network Problem

2.5 months ago Verizon FIOS was installed in my condo. While the tech was still on the premises I cranked up a browser and made sure that I could browse the web. Success!

I soon noticed that updates from Apple could not be installed on my Macbook. The message was that the downloaded files could not be verified. As the list of uninstalled updates grew larger I took the Macbook to the local independent Mac service place - Tekserve. The tech there successfully downloaded and installed an update then looked at me like I had a screw loose. He told me unequivocally that it was my network. Sure enough, I tried downloading other updates while I was still there connected to his wireless network and they all worked.

Other problems soon became apparent. The PlayStation couldn't download its latest software update. The Tivo couldn't download and install its update.

Did some research on the web and the problem is not ubiquitous. There are some reports of a similar ilk but few enough to make it obvious that this is not a generic FIOS problem. There was a lot of condemnation of the Actiontec M1424-WR router that comes as a part of new FIOS installs but I didn't pay much attention to the detail. Something about overflowing route tables.

A last resort call to Verizon support burned several hours of wait time and time with a tech but in the end there was no resolution and I was dumped off the call with him telling me that they do not filter any IP services. And how does that help me?

So I spoke with a fellow in the Accounting Dept and terminated my service. Ha, that'll show 'em! Then thoughts of it being a problem with the house cabling and/or having to fight Verizon r.e. early termination fees started to gnaw at me. An hour later I called them back and rescinded the cancel order.

Experienced a few afternoons at Starbucks downloading updates and then distributing them to different boxes once I got home. That gets old fast.

Next I tried replacing the Actiontec router ($50) via eBay. The replacement behaved exactly like the original.