Kendall Dunkelberg

Western Vacation

In July, Kim, Aidan, and I packed up the car and headed West. Well, actually, we drove North to my mother’s in Osage, Iowa, first, and spent a traditional 4th of July week there with fireworks, the parade, barbecue, ice cream, and lots of local flavor. Then we turned the nose of our Mazda west for an old-fashioned car-camping vacation. It was the kind of trip my family used to take nearly every summer. Long hours on the road with plenty of stops at national parks and other scenic places. So sitting behind the wheel and going back through this country was like a trip back in time, even though our pop-up tent was a lot easier to manage than my family’s Camp-O-Tel.

Back in the day, this was a tent that you put on top of your car. When you got to your campsite, you could unfold it and sleep up there. My parents slept in the car on a mattress, and us kids were in the car topper. There was a stove we could get down for cooking, and a ladder we could climb up when it was time for bed. It was the precursor to the ubiquitous pop-up trailer, which soon eclipsed the Camp-O-Tel. Even when we were using it, we rarely saw another one.

This summer, we had a little 5-person tent (those would be very skinny folks — the three of us had little room to spare, and we’re not big!) We had our sleeping bags, an air mattress (some of us are not as young as we used to be), a camp stove, cookware, food, and three suitcases, plus hiking boots, sunscreen, jackets, camp towels, flashlights, lanterns, and assorted other equipment all piled in the back of the Mazda. It was organized chaos, especially after a few days camping, but we managed 10 nights without much problem and only one night in a hotel when it rained all night. Fortunately, this was a break we had planned, and we guessed right about the weather. The next couple of nights we also had thunderstorms, but they didn’t last too long and the rain wasn’t so bad, so the only real issue was lightning.

We went first to the Badlands (where we had our only bad experience with an RV that ran its generator all night, grrr), then on to Rushmore and Custer State Park. From the Black Hills, we headed on to Yellowstone, stopping first just outside the park at Buffalo Bill State Park — a nice park but for the mosquito swarms that hit for about an hour at dusk and for the irrigation sprinklers that went off in the night (not at our camp spot, fortunately). We stayed in Yellowstone 4 night, which was a huge relief after setting up camp and packing it all up the next day for several days running. That also allowed us to be in the park and get to the sites we wanted to see each day much more quickly. Because it is bear country, we had to pack all of our food in our car when we weren’t actually cooking. We took advantage of this fact to have dinner out a couple of times, extending the amount of time we had in the park. We saw most of the main geysers and hot springs, saw lots of wildlife including so many bison we were nearly tired of them by the time we left, and hiked several trails. We didn’t do much back country hiking, though we went far enough from the boardwalks that we did carry bear spray to be on the safe side. Four nights were enough that we felt we really saw the park, but we also realized we could spend a week there (or much more) and still just touch the surface, especially if you got off the beaten track more. Some of our highlights besides the main attractions were Lamar Valley at sunset (in a thunderstorm part of the time, but it was still beautiful), swimming in Burning River, and hiking to the suspension bridge across Hellroaring Creek.

From Yellowstone, we headed south to Grand Teton National Park. This was the first park where we didn’t (couldn’t) make a reservation for the campground, and we were glad when we got there. Road construction meant a 30-minute delay, so we stopped at Colter Bay campgrounds and explored that area first. Here we were able to rent a canoe and spend a couple of hours on Lake Jackson. Aidan and I even swam in the lake. We also took a hike and saw some trumpeter swans nesting on one of the nearby ponds. The next morning, our plan was to get up early and beat the construction crew — didn’t quite make it even though we left the campground before 7:00, but the wait at the one-lane road wasn’t bad, and we still made it to a picnic area in time to cook a dozen eggs for breakfast. Usually we wouldn’t eat this much, but after over a week of camping, we were starting to feel the effect of camp rations and lots of hiking — a couple of us glad for the reduced padding, but ready for a more filling meal. We explored the south end of Tetons, vowing to go back and spend some more time, then headed on to Salt Lake City. We didn’t stop there, but did get our only hotel in the camping part of our trip in Provo. This was where the thunderstorms were the worst, so we were glad we hadn’t found a good park (though there is a state park we could have tried if the weather had cooperated).

Next stop was Arches and Canyonlands for a very impressive, but very different kind of landscape. We went from 40 degrees at night in Yellowstone to dry and hot in Utah, but fortunately we hit it right and the highs were only in the 90’s. We took the parks’ advice and drank plenty of water. Hiked to Delicate Arch and several other short hikes around other arches. In the night we had storms and a mule deer who didn’t like us for camping under his or her mulberry trees. The next day we toured Canyonlands and headed to Mesa Verde, where we camped, hiked, and took a tour of one of the cliff dwellings in the morning. We would have loved to stay longer, but needed to hit the road for the drive through New Mexico to Albuquerque to see Rudy and the rest of the Lucero clan for a brief visit. It was great to eat Michael’s New Mexican cooking — he’s becoming quite the chef — and visit with Liz, Kyle, and Andy. Wish we could have stayed longer there, too, but home was calling.

Family marked the bookends of our trip. We just had a two-day trek back to Mississippi, and for that we hooked up with friends Andy, Elizabeth, and Ely, swapping passengers and riding across Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas together, catching up along the way. It just so happened that both families were returning from our Western vacations on the same days, and our paths crossed in Albuquerque. We spent the night in a hotel in Oklahoma city (they weren’t camping, and hoteling it allowed us to get a little further each day) and separated in Memphis at the visitor’s center rest area.

After two weeks on the road, we returned refreshed, though ready to be out of the car. We had seen a ton of scenery along the way and had some great experiences. We’ll definitely be planning another old-fashioned road trip, including camping, another time soon!

Zinneke’s Story

Our dog Zinneke died yesterday of complications of autoimmune hemolytic anemia. If you’ve followed the posts I’ve written over the last couple of months, then you’ll know what a roller coaster ride this has been. Some dogs survive this disease, and others die very quickly. Some, like Zinne, seem to be doing all right for awhile, then take a sudden turn for the worse. Relapse in the first months to a year is common, so we were prepared for it, though you never are fully prepared. During the first week of the disease, we thought we were going to lose her, until buttermilk and the medicine kicking in, got her appetite back and she began to recover. She seemed to be doing well for several weeks, then a week ago, the Prednizone she was on stopped working as well — we increased her dosage back to the level she was taking in the beginning. This Sunday, she could hardly walk, and we had to carry her to the yard to pee. We kept her indoors by us much of the time, and tried to comfort her as much as possible, bringing her food and water when she wanted it. In the morning, we took her directly to our vet, who gave her more steroids with a shot, and also gave her an antibiotic shot, since she had a slight fever. We were somewhat hopeful that she’d pull through again with proper treatment, but in the afternoon we received the call that she had just lain down and died very suddenly, which is why the vet suspected a blood clot, a common side effect of the disease.

Zinneke was 7 and a half years old. We had her in our lives for nearly 7 of those years — we brought her home on July 13, 2006. The picture above is from that first day. If you knew her in recent years, you can see the ten pounds or so she gained in her first year (and we struggled a little to keep her at optimum weight — she was always happy to keep eating, though she was always happy to exercise until the last couple of months). She was calm and gentle, but as a herding dog (we assume), she did nip a few people in the heels now and then — esp. kids running by or strangers who invaded her house. We had pretty much weened her of that behavior, though the instinct to herd anything running past her was still strong. She never ran away from home (except for one time, when a foster dog led her on an excursion and she got a block away before realizing there was a fence between her and her back yard — her barks led us to where she was, so she wasn’t missing long). She would stay in our fenced in yard or in my Mom’s completely unfenced yard. She didn’t do tricks, but she would obey nearly any command. And she was one of the best popcorn catching dogs you will ever meet, though frisbees were only meant to be picked up off the ground in her opinion–then she would want you to chase her around the yard with it. When she was young, she used to run circles around the yard for the pure joy of it, and she loved it most if someone would try to catch her. But she was never much of a barker. Only if she was left outside longer than she wanted to be, then she would let us know, or if a stranger came to the door, she would announce them.

Zinneke was a very healthy dog most of her life, though she was no stranger to hospitals. When we first brought her home from the Humane Society, we knew she had a great personality, but it didn’t take long to realize there was a slight problem. She peed. At first, we thought she was a house-training challenge, so we took her to the yard a lot. Still, she peed in the yard, and then peed some more as soon as she came inside. We took her to the vet, thinking she might have a urinary tract infection, which might be a complication of her recent operation for spaying. Our vet gave us some medicine, and we watched her for month. You might say she tried our patience, though we knew by that point that something was wrong, and she wasn’t intentionally soiling our carpets — we did replace those and put down hardwood later. When we finally took her to the vet school at Mississippi State, we learned that she had an ectopic ureter. Essentially, her plumbing wasn’t hooked up right and one of her kidneys wasn’t connected to her bladder. She spent the first nine months of her life constantly leaking a little urine, which was probably why the family that surrendered her at the Humane Society did that, though they apparently didn’t give the real reason. We were told she was too aggressive with children (and she did nip kids, so that might have been part of the reason). She had been at the shelter for two months already; if someone hadn’t adopted her, she wouldn’t have lived long. And if she didn’t get treatment, it would likely lead to an infection that could be fatal.

It took an expensive operation and much post-operative care to get her back to normal. We never regretted the cost, knowing that we had a lifetime of love from our pet to look forward to. It was also a responsibility that we had agreed to take on when we adopted her, so we were just glad we had the resources to be able to give her the care she needed. (And we can certainly sympathize with those who face a similar choice and don’t have those resources — whether that means the financial resources to pay for the surgery or the nearby vet school that can perform the surgery). After the operation, she developed a bladder of steel. We remember one early camping trip when she wouldn’t relieve herself on a leash until 4:00 in the morning, when I had to take her out of the tent and let her off leash in a field. Even after that, we never had problems with her until recently, when she was on steroids and again couldn’t help herself. We also remember her puppy bouts with car sickness and a few other trials, but for the most part, she was a trouble-free pet. Our only trips to the vet were for her annual shots or to pick up heart worm and flea medicine. We spent more time at the vet with the various foster dogs that we took in temporarily than we did with Zinneke.

Of course, we expected 13 or more years with her, or possibly less since we didn’t know her pedigree. We’ve often been told she looks like a blue heeler or a cattle dog, though we’ve never known for sure. She certainly acted like a herding dog, though. That she would also come down with a somewhat rare terminal disease (40-60% of dogs die of the disease within the first year or so, and most dogs who get it will have their lifespan shortened) seems unfair, but life is unfair and unpredictable in this regard. And though we would like to have had several more years with Zinneke, we value every day we had with her. She was an excellent dog who gave as much love back as we could give her and who taught us many lessons. There are many other Zinneke stories, and I’m sure we’ll tell them to each other over the next weeks and days as we grieve together and remember her.

Fiddling Around

I try not to brag on our son too much or I might sound like a broken record, but with Father’s day coming up, I can play the proud father for awhile. Aidan impresses us in all kinds of ways, but one way is with music. He’s played violin since he was four and is working his way through the Suzuki repertoire. Since he was 8, he’s taken fiddle lessons from Jim Brock, a local fiddler who played with Bill Monroe, Jim and Jesse, and the Salzman Brothers, among others. They sit around and play music, which I get to record. Mr. Brock teaches Aidan old-time fiddle tunes, country songs, bluegrass, jazz, Western Swing, etc., and since he doesn’t read music, they do it all by ear. Mr. Brock has also introduced us to a number of great old fiddlers — Kenny Baker is one of Aidan’s favorites, as are Tommy Jackson, Benny Martin, Arthur Smith, and Charlie Stripling. So Aidan has developed a wide range of styles and a sizable repertoire. At one count, they were up to nearly 200 songs, though some aren’t full songs — just the fiddle licks to songs Mr. Brock plays with his band. Some are ones we learned and haven’t kept up on, but many are ones that Aidan has played at Pilgrimage or that he continues to play, and a few are ones he picked up off of a CD.

This year, we decided it was time to get Aidan to play in public. He’s done performances with the Suzuki groups and orchestra, of course, and he plays now and then with Mr. Brock, lately at the senior dance in New Hope, but then he’s not on his own, and he often just plays on a few songs with Mr. Brock. So we signed him up to play at the Columbus MS Hitching Lot Farmer’s Market. To prepare, we went through his extensive list and pulled out the songs he thought he could have ready. We came up with 6 sets of about 110 songs total. It was ambitious, but he was up for the task. For the past two weeks or more, he’s been practicing over an hour a day to get his sets ready to go.

This morning, he played his three hour gig, and did a marvelous job. In that time, he took a couple of longer breaks to refuel with a pastry from one of the vendors, and he only repeated a couple of songs near the very end. He played from 7:00 a.m. until about 9:45, when everyone was packing up their wares. And he hardly missed a beat, even when Mother Goose showed up and danced with kids to his songs. (If you’re not from Columbus, then you won’t know Edwina Williams, this Columbus institution — the town’s child librarian who has performed as MG for decades. Let’s just say she’s flamboyant, esp. in full costume with flowered hat and stuffed goose.) Here are links to three of the songs he played (If you look close, you can just see Mother Goose in the first one behind the tent pole): Methodist Preacher, Orange Blossom Special, and Scotland.

All he had to work with was his set list with the titles and the note each song starts on. He had come up with this idea as a way to help him keep them all straight, though in the end, I don’t think he even needed it! This morning was a lovely morning. Lots of people stopped by to listen, and the weather was grand, actually fairly cool for June in Mississippi. I couldn’t have asked for a better start to the weekend.

Canine Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia update

Our dog had some bad news this week, though apparently it’s not uncommon. We took her in for her blood test and learned her red cell count was down, which is not the direction we want to see it going. I wasn’t surprised, since she’s been less energetic in the past week or so. We hoped it was the heat, but the test confirmed that she’s not getting better. So our vet increased the dose o steroids again from 3/4 of a pill twice a day to 1 pill twice a day.

Reading online, my wife found that other people had similar experiences. Though she had seemed to respond well, and had been on 3/4 of a pill for a month, now she’s having a bit of a relapse. Or maybe the reduction in medicine was too soon. We’re hopeful that increasing the dosage will help, and that she’ll still be able to reduce the dose again later. It seems like this can happen. For now, the goal is to stabilize her blood count and get it up to the level where she needs to be.

DSL Modem Conclusion (I Hope)

Everything in our DSL modem trauma came to a head yesterday when my wife tried to call home but couldn’t get the phone to ring. It would ring briefly on her end, then go directly to busy or static. We confirmed this with a FaceTime call, since our DSL was working at the time. Before calling for ATT support again, I ran through all the options I could think of inside, including running new line to our phone box on the house and new phone cords, DSL filter, etc. Eventually, I even took the phone outdoors to the box and used my cell phone to call it. Still no luck. (Note to self: try the last step first next time!) That confirmed that the problem was with the line, not the phone, so I called ATT.

Their phone support for home phone issues is Byzantine to put it mildly, but after navigating all of the options, I got to where it would test my line and put in a service request. What was frustrating was that I never was able to talk to a human, and I had to hang up the phone so they could test it. They never called me back, though eventually, I was able to check online to see the status of my request. There I confirmed what the phone message had told me: they promised to have the service problem resolved in a week and a day. Naturally, that didn’t make me very happy, but I was glad when a couple hours later a very helpful service technician arrived to check out my line.

He used some fancy testing apparatus and could tell there were problems coming into our house. Eventually, he climbed a pole and fixed something there. We confirmed that the line was working again (he called me on it) and that our DSL was back up (and it hasn’t gone out since). He agreed that the phone line problem may have led to the DSL connection problems, though he didn’t say for certain that was to problem. Since we don’t have inside wire maintenance, he didn’t do any testing in the house other than to call in and check the internet connection.

What I suspect is that we were losing our signal periodically (every few minutes or every few hours) due to the problems on the line. The Motorola 3360 modem isn’t good at reestablishing the connection in Bridge Mode, but does better when you set the modem to establish the PPPoE connection. At least that’s what I’m hoping. And I hope that now that the line problem is fixed, the modem will work in Bridge Mode because it won’t lose the connection all the time. So far, so good. In over 12 hours, we haven’t lost our connection yet. Interestingly, when I called DSL support, they tested the line, and it checked out okay — there were no internet outages, and our speed test when connected was actually quite good — but they didn’t uncover the phone line issue. That took finding out that people couldn’t dial in (we could dial out and establish DSL).

So if troubleshooting a DSL issue, I would recommend testing your phone line. I can’t guarantee that you’ll always have the same problem we had, though you might experience static on the line (something we’ve noticed in the past as well). Check at the box where your phone line comes in the house (esp. if, like us, you do your own inside line maintenance) and rule out other problems in the home wiring before you call.

Motorola 3360 Follow-Up

Well, I had hoped I’d fixed my modem, and I did get it working, but it hasn’t stayed fixed very much in the past few days. I’ve had a couple more calls to ATT ‘tech support’–one guy was very helpful; though he didn’t solve my problem, he did have information that helped me live with it. Another guy was abysmal. Basically, he just wanted me to go away. He suggested I try connecting just with the computer for awhile to see whether that helped. Nope.

Here’s what I’ve learned, at least in my situation. When I’m connected using my Airport Express, I should have three green lights (power, ethernet, and DSL), but the Internet light won’t light up, since the modem hasn’t made the connection in Bridge Mode. The green light on the Airport shows that. And I do get the occasional flash on the Activity light.

My connection will last anywhere from a few hours to a few minutes using the Airport as my router. When it loses the connection, sometimes I can get it back if I disconnect and let it reconnect. That’s what I try first.When that doesn’t work (more than half of the time), then I have to connect directly to my laptop and change my settings.

To do this, I turn off Airport on the laptop to force it to use ethernet. Then I often try making a connection over PPPoE using the laptop (I set that up as part of my troubleshooting.) Invariably that doesn’t work, but it seems to help me establish an ethernet connection to the modem in the next step. I enter the physical address of the modem 192.186.1.254 in my browser (you can bet I have this bookmarked!). Usually when I get there, I see an error message that Broadband is down. I have to restart the modem a couple of times to clear this, and as I’m doing this, I change my setting from Bridge Mode to PPPoE On Modem using Advanced Settings/PPP Location (to get here, I need the access code on my modem, though I’ve saved this to my Notes, so I can copy and paste). That causes a restart. Then I try to connect by clicking on Connect — I need my access code again at this point, and the modem restarts). That usually still gives me an error, but the second time I connect after changing my settings to PPPoE on Modem, I can get online.

Sometimes I operate like this for awhile, if I’m the only one who needs internet access. Sometimes I change to PPPoE on Computer (entering my code again, and restarting the modem) but let my laptop do the dialing for awhile. Things seem to work best if there’s just the computer and the modem with the modem logging in the PPPoE connection, but even then, I have had brief outages several times last night. They only lasted half a minute or so, and the modem was able to reestablish the connection. When my laptop does the PPPoE, my connection seems to last longer, but I still run into problems eventually (and of course, I can’t print, and no one else can access the internet). When I plug back into the Airport, everything is fine again. That is, until the next outage, which can be anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Over the past few days, I have lost my connection at least 5 times a day; some days it seems more like 50 (probably closer to 20). I do sense another call to ‘ATT tech support’ coming on, since this is not acceptable, especially for a brand new modem and a brand new Airport. (I’d call Apple, but I really don’t think the problem is with the Airport, since it happens with my laptop as well.)

Will post more if I come up with a solution that is more permanent (or if ATT has more answers).

Can Spam Comments Help Me Teach Creative Writing?

Note to self:

Next time I’m confronted with students who want to “keep things general so everyone can identify with them,” I should trot out my blog’s latest spam comments. It will have to be the latest ones, unless I remember to keep copies of some on file. I just threw out a few, then realized what great examples they would make. Invariably they “Really love your site,” because it is “one of the best we’ve ever seen on this topic.” But they don’t mention the topic, or if they do, it comes straight out of the post’s title and doesn’t fit the rest of the comment. I could just hand them out as little rewards, or tape them to the drafts that students turn in and then ask them how they like being told that:

They are “the greatest at creative writing because this piece handles its subject impressively well,” and I have “never seen such emotional writing on a topic like this,” so I will “definitely come back when I need more information on this topic.”

What impresses me most about the “best” spam comments are the lengths to which they go to be so general they could apply to virtually any context. Why anyone would believe that the comment was actually written in response to something they wrote, is beyond me. If someone wants to praise me, they ought to be able to be a little specific about what I’m being praised for. And if that someone wants me to click on a link in their comment or check out their blog, then they’d really better let me know that they actually read mine! I value those real comments, but the spam has always seemed worthless and futile, at least until now. Maybe I can recycle it into an object lesson in specificity.

Life with Canine Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia

A few weeks ago, I made a post about how I got our dog to start eating again by giving her buttermilk. In it, I revealed Canine Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia. Now, this has been one of my top recent posts (yes, WordPress, I do look at my Dashboard!), so I thought a follow-up post is in order. No, I never did ask the vet about the buttermilk, and I haven’t had to give her anymore since I wrote about it. Zinneke is back on dry food, and her appetite is very healthy. We’ve had very few problems, and her energy continues to improve, despite the fact that our vet has begun to reduce the steroid dosage from one pill twice a day to 3/4 pill twice a day. We hope next week it might go down to half a pill.

So what were the complications, once we got past the initial loss of appetite and lethargy? The main complication was simply a side effect of the steroids: because they make her drink a ton of water, we had some accidents in the house. Now, you have to realize that Zinne has always had a bladder of steel — well, at least since she had the very expensive bladder repair surgery when we first got her (it turned out her bladder wasn’t hooked up to her kidneys right, so she peed constantly then). I was getting up a couple of times a night to let her out and trying not to leave her alone for very long, but we were too optimistic. Even though I was getting up to let her out, she either went before my alarm went off or couldn’t hold out long enough while we were gone.

This meant a few places on our rugs needed some serious cleaning, and I spent one solid weekend on one room, and then tackled another room before we were done. You may ask, how we cleaned the rugs. We have a carpet cleaner (Dirt Devil) from the days when we had carpets. Now we have area rugs on hardwood floors. So I bought a big plastic drop cloth and put it under one rug (used a couple smaller old ones on the other rug) and shampooed the carpet with Nature’s Miracle carpet cleaner. For the worst spots, I also saturated them with Nature’s Miracle urine destroyer, let them soak for over an hour, then shampooed the rug with the carpet cleaner. When I say saturated, I really mean I got it soaking wet before letting it soak.

(I usually don’t endorse products, but these worked. We’ve used other enzyme based pet odor removers in the past, esp. when house training a pet, and had good success, but I was particularly impressed with the urine destroyer. It did the trick with steroid induced pee, which more plentiful and odoriferous than typical dog pee. It worked better than the carpet cleaner or the regular-strength Odor Remover, which I tried first.)

Now, there’s no smell. But the dog does stay outside more! I let her be in with us when we are around, but at night or if we’re going to be gone, she has to be out back in our fenced-in yard with lots of water. And she’s gotten used to it. She’ll usually bark to wake me up in the morning about 6:00 or so. (If she would bark to be let out she could stay in all night, but she didn’t do that.) Fortunately, it’s summer, and as her medicine gets reduced, we should be able to trust her again, so we’ll try leaving her inside. But for now, we have a new routine, and a relatively healthy pet who keeps getting better every day.

Her favorite part of being sick is probably getting her medicine in peanut butter twice a day. If she ever gets to the point where she doesn’t need any steroids, we’ll probably still need to give her a little peanut butter on a finger now and then! (Of course, we’ve read that many dogs have a relapse within a year and that the disease can shorten the dog’s life expectancy dramatically, but for now, we’re glad that she’s recovering very well.)

Mac Tip: Search for Hidden Files

Usually Macs are good at hiding the things you don’t need to mess with and showing you what to do when you need to do it. There are a few times when you want to get in and muck around with those hidden things, and it can be frustrating not to have clear instructions about how to get at them. As Mac OS X has been updated, it seems like the number of things in the hidden category has increased, which isn’t always a happy thing. What I used to be able to find relatively easily has become more of a challenge in the labyrinth of OS X Mt. Lion. (But I’m not really complaining — Windows is even worse in this regard, as is iOS).

This morning, I wanted to uninstall some software that didn’t have an uninstaller. I had installed a trial version that ran out before I made much use of it, so I wanted to take it off my computer. Doing that was easy enough by dragging the application to the trash, I know from past experience that there are files lurking on my drive that I’d like to delete. I searched online, but couldn’t find any instructions. I searched my drive for the software’s name, but nothing came up. Yet I could find a folder in my Library when I looked in Application Support, and I suspected there were more files than that. Searching online some more, I found a few more possibilities of places to look (PDF Services, for one), and I knew there were probably a couple of Preferences files, but finding those with the arcane names they have in the super-long list of preferences was next to impossible. So I still wanted to search for them, but couldn’t find out how.

Let me take a step back for those who aren’t OS X afficionados. You may be saying, “Wait a minute, how did you open your Library folder? I can’t find mine!” It’s true this is one area that has become hidden in Lion and above. I remembered the trick to see it. Hold the Option key and then click on the Go menu in Finder. You will now see the Library folder as an option (this takes you to your User account library, not the main library, which you can see without this trick). Knowing this trick is what helped me figure out how to do my search (and I’m writing this post so I’ll remember it next time, as well as to help others, since I didn’t find any good advice online about searching for these kinds of files).

It eventually occurred to me that I might be able to find the files in my Library by first going there using the trick I just described. Once I was looking at my Library folder, I could search on the app’s name, and if I clicked on “Library” in the search options, then it focused my search on this folder and because I was in it, the files were now visible. I found two preference files that I hadn’t been able to find when I was outside the library folder. I just confirmed this with the search below. When I click on “This Mac,” I don’t see the files for an application, but when I click on “Library,” I do.

How I fixed my DSL modem connection, no thanks to ATT support

Warning: for those who are looking for my thoughts on poetry or cooking, this is one of my techie posts. Now and then, I become a complete nerd. My apologies! Look around my blog for other more interesting stuff, if you’re not looking for arcane information on internet connections or Apple products.

Disclaimer: ATT’s help desk might have been able to help me if I had given all the information. I didn’t realize they might need some of the information that follows, so I didn’t volunteer it, and ATT help dude did not ask the appropriate questions to resolve my issue without suggesting I send back the modem.

Note to ATT: Your hold notices that constantly tell me how I could easily troubleshoot my problem online really don’t put me in the best mood when my problem is that I can’t get online.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten those mini-rants out of the way, here’s the deal…

Tonight our internet connection went down. I did the usual steps of restarting the modem, waiting awhile, restarting my computer and the modem, and then trying to connect directly to the modem from my computer with an ethernet cable. I even tried a second ethernet cable. But nothing worked. That’s when I thought there must be a serious problem, so I called ATT’s help desk, actually hoping they might be able to tell me if there was an internet problem in my area, but fearing there was a problem with the modem.

ATT’s helpdesk walked me through the usual troubleshooting steps, including resetting the modem, which should have resolved the problem, but didn’t. He had me hold the reset button for 5 seconds. The instructions just say “Press the reset button.” When my computer was getting the wrong IP address from the DNS server, I was told that the modem must be bad and would need to be replaced. Or he thought it might be my computer. He didn’t think to ask me the one question that would have resolved the issue, and if I had remembered to tell him, that could have made a better support experience, too. But it’s been awhile since I set up the modem, so I wasn’t thinking about this…

I run a Motorola 3360 DSL modem with an Apple Airport Express base station. To do this, I have the modem set up in Bridged Mode, so that the Airport Express can make the PPPoE connection (login to my DSL account). Why? Because my modem doesn’t assign DNS addresses to computers on my network: it only works with one computer or router, so I have to have the Airport give our computers, iPad, etc. their DNS addresses. To have it do this, I also have to set the Airport to login to ATT DSL (and tell the modem not to do that, which is called operating in Bridged Mode).

When I hung up the phone with ATT support, I was very frustrated that my modem wouldn’t work. I really needed it tonight, and fortunately, I had told the support tech that I would take the modem back to the store in the morning, rather than have him replace it (because I didn’t want to wait for them to ship a new modem). I thought I would try resetting it one more time, and this time I held the button for 30 seconds (remembering that trick from past modems). All the lights went green, and I had an ‘internet connection,’ though actually, as I learned, I really didn’t.

It took me a little while to figure out that I was logged into the default account. I remembered that I had to go back in and change my username and password, so that I could actually get online. Fortunately, after the hard reset, I was now able to access the setup menus on the modem (see below for an explanation). I entered my information, and restarted the modem. Low and behold, I was back online, though I was tethered to the modem with an ethernet cable.

I did the most important communications that I’d been in a hurry to do, then got to thinking about restoring my wireless setup. A little searching online reminded me that I had to change the PPP Location setting to On Computer, instead of the default On Modem. I knew this, but didn’t remember what it was called or where to change the setting. And I hadn’t remembered one key thing…

When I made these changes, the modem gave me a warning as it restarted. Essentially, it told me that I wouldn’t be able to access the modem’s settings interface unless I made the right changes on my computer (I saved these instructions and hope I’ll remember where I put them) or reset the modem. This explains why I wasn’t able to make a direct connection to the modem’s interface until I had succeeded in resetting the modem.

If I had remembered that, I might never have called ATT, or if the tech support guy had thought to ask about bridge mode, then I would have told him. Since I had disconnected my Airport and was trying to connect directly from my computer, I didn’t think it was relevant to tell him that I had the Airport connected at one point. If I’d said that, he probably would have figured it out.

So, if you’re troubleshooting a DSL modem connection problem, it’s probably worth asking whether the modem has ever been set to Bridged Mode. Or if you’re resetting the modem, it’s probably worth holding that button for at least 30 seconds to force a complete reset to factory settings. My 5-second reset gave me the appropriate flashing lights, but obviously didn’t reset everything.

What I don’t know is why the modem stopped working in the first place. My guess is that it was something on ATT’s end that cleared up eventually on its own. Usually restarting the modem fixes the issue when that happens occasionally.

What I do know is how to reset the modem and set everything back up again if this happens again (and I wrote myself instructions for when it happens again). And I know that there’s not a problem with the modem just because my computer can’t connect to the setup screen. Maybe that will help me avoid calling ATT for ‘support’ in the future.