Cruel Joke

    Building computers (and making hideous Christmas light mods, as seen right) has been a hobby of mine since a young age.  I always find great accomplishment in being able to pick and choose a variety of components to make a machine that can essentially do anything.
    Over the years I've dealt with my fair share of troubleshooting and by now am able recognize the most common mistakes rather quickly.  For example, my friend Paul S. recently bought parts to build his own computer and was having trouble installing an operating system on his new rig.  Rather quickly we were able to pinpoint the issue to us trying to install a 32bit OS on a 64bit processor.  Problem Solved.
    Eventually after completing a (relatively) smooth installation, we had trouble getting the computer online.  This was strange since I've never had much of an issue connecting a computer to a network.  We played around with different fixes for about an hour, reinstalling ethernet drivers and switching what ports cables were connected to, but nothing seemed to work.  At that point I decided it was too late to think properly and thought it would be better to try again the next day after some rest.
    I got back to my room and decided to read some news online before going to bed.  To my surprise the internet was not working on my computer either! After all of that troubleshooting the problem ended up not being on our end but on the network. Oh well.  Even though we spent all of that time trying to fix a problem that was out of our control, the time wasn't a complete waste: my Guitar Hero playing skills improved ten fold by playing so much in between system reboots.