An Army of 1 in 10

Ingredients

16 pieces of crow breast meat (no bones) (8 crows)
16 pieces of green pepper
16 cherry tomatoes
8 button mushrooms
8 ears of sweet corn
1 1/2 cups of Teriyaki sauce
1/2 cup melted butter
8 kabob skewers

Preparation

Cut each piece of crow in half and place in a covered bowl with the Teriyaki sauce over night. Clean and cut each ear of corn into 3 pieces. Cook in boiling salt water for 10 minutes. Alternately put corn (3 pieces), green peppers (3 pieces) and cherry tomatoes (3) along with 4 pieces of crow meat on each skewer. Use 1 mushroom to top each skewer. Brush with melted butter and place on preheated grill for about 4 minutes. Flip, butter again and place back on grill for another 4 minutes. Repeat one last time for a total of 12 minutes or until they appear done. Serves four adults.

What’s with the crow recipe, I’m sure you’re wondering? Well, it’s something I may need to prepare for myself because I’ve just discovered I was being stupid.

Several weeks ago when I moved to my new residence, I informed my ISP of the move and I was told that the internet connection would be working on April 15th. Well, I was TDY at the time so I wasn’t able to verify it on that date. I returned several days later and came home to no internet connection.

So for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been contacting them and telling them that the DSL line was inoperative and I had no internet connection. Now, I’m not computer illiterate at all and I’m quite capable of debugging and fixing problems (considering that I’m a hacker, it comes as no surprise that I know when a problem is not with my equipment), yet their response was always that the line was active. I knew that it was not!

Well, today they sent a technician to check things out. I was at work at the time the technician was here so I wasn’t able to show him the problem. That’s not an issue though, because all I needed was for the DSL line to be activated and my presence wasn’t required for that. Now, the setup I have is as such:

1 DSL modem
1 router
1 telephone
1 splitter
The telephone and modem are plugged into the splitter, which is plugged into the phone jack. The router is plugged into the modem. The modem is plugged into the splitter with a yellow ethernet cable while the router uses a grey cable to connect to the modem.

A pretty standard setup, right? So simple that a caveman can do it, right? Apparently not.

I came home this evening and took a glance at the modem. As I expected, the only light that was on was the power light. I did think that it was kind of odd that the LAN light wasn’t on, however. Deciding to take a closer look at the modem, I lifted it and looked at the back.

Remember how I said that the modem was plugged into the splitter using a yellow cable? Well, that cable turned out to be plugged into the LAN connecter instead of the DSL connector! Once I swapped the cables, the lights came on and an internet connection was established.

I sure hope crow tastes good, because I’m going to have to be eating it soon.