The evening before I left for CES was a little crazy with the packing and preparation I needed to do to get ready for an early flight last Tuesday morning. My last errand that day was getting to the library to get a book (instead of reading eBooks solely on my iPhone that would be a drain on the battery on flights without power outlets), during which my husband called me. I contemplated asking him if a package had arrived for me, but decided that I wanted to put off the disappointment if there wasn’t one waiting for me until I got home, so I didn’t ask. As I pulled into the driveway, I *thought* I spied a package on the front porch, but thought I could be hallucinating optimistically. When I checked, it was an indeed a package containing my replacement USB modem. Yay!
Amidst folding laundry and watching an episode of Heroes (we had far more episodes to watch from the 3rd season than I’d thought and our initial marathon petered out after 4 straight episodes), I tried the modem out. Again, I’d chosen the USBConnect Mercury modem, selecting it over the Quicksilver model since the Mercury has a built-in microSD card slot to make it a USB thumb drive as well (the 8GB card I bought on eBay has not yet arrived, however). If you read about the debacle that resulted with my first modem (I blogged about it a couple of weeks ago), you can understand that I was a little anxious to get this replacement working. I did, but it took a little more effort than expected.
With the first Mercury I’d received, there was no instruction card in the box asking me to call an 800-number to activate it first, and it worked for 10 seconds, pooped out, and then tech support mayhem ensued. I had confirmed with AT&T support that I didn’t need to activate it first, so I was sure I didn’t miss a step in the troubleshooting. The replacement Mercury, however, did come with an instruction card asking me to activate it. I ignored it at first, thinking it was just thrown in the box out of habit and didn’t apply since the first one hadn’t needed it. Due to my arrogance, the gods of tech deemed that I was to be wrong.
After trying to get the modem to work to no avail, I went back to the stupid activation card and followed the instructions on a whim. After that, it worked like a charm. To boot, because I’m running the latest version of Leopard, 10.5.6., I didn’t need the Connection Manager software and only needed to install a driver that prompts a signal meter to appear in my task bar when the modem is connected, through which I can connect, disconnect, or turn the modem off. Quite nifty, and it’s nice to not have to install another application on my Mac.
So, I’ll do a review of the modem after I get some more use out of it. I’m posting this as I wait at the McCarran airport to leave Vegas after CES and it turns out that I didn’t get to use it much at all during my time here, and the one time I did try to use it resulted in more Epic Failage. I’ll explain what happened (and talk about CES) in my next post, which will be written after I recuperate with 48 hours of non-stop sleep.
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