OK, it's in! Comcast cable guy came yseterday, and set up the box (which consisted of basically plugging in a Motorola SurfBoard -- which I'm renting for the low, low fee of $3/mo). My son-in-law had some surplus D-Link stuff that He was no longer using (DI624 G-Xtreme router, Indoor antenna, and PCI card). After some fiddling with it, I got the whole thing to connect, and I'm getting LRPDs as fast as when I was at work.

Now for the bitching. The morons a Comcast are a bunch of lying SOBs. Not one, but two sales drones stated most emphatically that I could transfer my domain to their servers, and that there would be no cost for the transfer. Would that mean that I can get mail sent to my domain-based email addresses forwarded to the Comcast servers? Sure, no problem, I'm told. WRONG! They don't host mail domains, period. So I need to figure out how to whack the DNSs to point mail directed to burnsgroup-dot-com to one (or more) of the severn mailboxes I'm permitted to have at Comcast without having Interaccess/Hosting.com/Allegiance/XO Communications hostthe domain. (Greg, any ideas?)

Then there was the problem of getting the modem comissioned. Since the modem is located well away from the computers (which is why I have a wireless network...duh!), there was no way to directly connect to the modem and do the commissioning dance. The installer, after repeatedly asking whether I had a laptop to directly connect to the modem (answer: No, I don't), gave me a phone number to call and have them commission it. OK, so I call the number, get "Ravi" on the phone, who insists that such a thing cannot be done, and that I will have to schedule a service call for a tech with a laptop to come out and do the comissioning...for a small fee that he "didn't know". Well, in the process of forwarding my call to the place where such a call could be set up, "ravi" dropped the call completely. So I call back, ready to take "Ravi"'s head off. Instead, I get a very nice lady ("Marion", I think), who comissioned the modem, and set up my base e-mail address (although she didn't give me the server name so I could set up Thunderbird...mostly because I forgot to ask).

Lessions: 1) Comcast's help is highly variable as to their knowledge, so if you don't get the right answer first, try again. 2) Don't believe anything the sales staff says WRT technical issues (but I should already know that...).

Anyway, Zoom-zoom! Thanks one and all for the counseling during this adventure!