I’d forgotten that today would normally have been Tax Day until we walked by our neighbors and found them greeting us on their lawn:

Of course, I made sure to be at least six feet away when I took the photo!

I’m continuing to have good Internet connectivity with my own modem (Xfinity’s is still in its shrinkwrap). An all-day ping to my Linode server has only shown three dropped packets, which doesn’t seem too terrible. But I’m going to wait another couple of days before I return their modem, just in case.

Speaking of returning things, I sent my old MacBook Pro to Apple for recycling and trade-in. I’d bought it just under 10 years ago, soon after being laid off from IBM. My manager allowed me to hang on to IBM’s MacBook Pro for a few weeks until Apple’s new models were available, for which I’m still grateful; I’m sure if I’d bought the previous model, I would have had to replace it a long time ago!

Now I’m erasing my old Time Capsule – it was never the most reliable form of backup, and it’s time to put it out to pasture, too. I guess I should get a small hard disk and use it for Time Machine; I hardly ever have restored a file from Time Machine (partially because doing it from a Time Capsule was painful), but there’ll be a time sometime when I need to…right?

Our Internet woes continued this morning; rebooting everything didn’t help, so I finally gave into desperation and called Xfinity. I used their chat tool to set up a callback from tech support; 15 minutes later, my cellphone rang and I was talking to Brian at tech support in Honduras. I described the problem and let him know I was seeing a lot of packet loss as well as huge variability in ping time; a few minutes later, he’d downloaded new firmware to my modem, restarted it, and all was well. Thanks, Xfinity, and thanks Brian!

Except that an hour later, the Internet service went all to hell again. I got back with Xfinity and another agent tried to reset my modem with limited success – then yet ANOTHER agent called me, looked at the signals and suggested I get a temporary rental modem from the service center. I agreed and he set it up on my account and drove over to the service center. It was the easiest in-person transaction I’ve ever had with Xfinity.

As long as we were out, we did this week’s shopping (Talenti gelato was still on sale at Nob Hill!), and when I returned, I was happy to hear the Sonos playing away.

I’d left a ping running when we left – to my great surprise, there had been NO packet loss for the two hours we’d been away. I decided to take my chances and leave my old modem in place but monitor what was going on.

It’s been 6 hours so far with no packet losses. It’s as if agreeing to pay Xfinity another $14/month (plus $9 in taxes and fees!) solved the problem all by itself.

I’m going to leave things as they are for a few days; if the problem doesn’t recur by next shopping day, I’ll take the modem back, still in its protective plastic, and see what happens then.