Day 5

The internet saga continues, and I feel bad that we have to pack up the kids each morning and have them traipse along beside us and sit in a room somewhere in this small town while we follow another dead end. Today we headed back to the all-inclusive resort, where the IT guy was available. He looked at my computer and went away and came back with a printout of what he called “LAN / IP settings.” We attempted to enter them into the laptop, all the while making me fearful that I’d lose some other, vital setting. I was recording any set of numbers I came across in my network listings. I am always wary of a PC person touching my Mac settings, and a PC person who speaks a language I don’t comprehend is only scarier.

After trying many configurations, we still couldn’t access the internet, although my fan was the strongest I had seen it since we had been in JFK the other night. Then the IT guy and I took turns just staring at the computer. As we stared, with one or the other clicking on something to open another box, I noticed hotel employees gathering around us. The IT guy turns to one of them and says “Macintosh.” Amy and I have shared how we feel that no one in this region has any clue of what a Mac is, much less whether they are compatible with the local networks. I get the feeling that every network, every internet café is manned by someone who learned the specific tricks needed for their little café, without getting any training in computer skills at large. As 6-7 resort employees gather around, I hear the IT guy, who had spoken very little, much less very little English, point at the laptop and say “camera.” To assist with his presentation, I turned on Photobooth and took pictures of all the employees. Heck, if I ever get the damn connection figured out, I’ll need to be on their good side to hang out in their lobby every day, checking my e-mail. Maybe I can take pictures of all their guests and sell bad prints with stock Caribbean backgrounds back to them.

After this I sit in the lobby and play with the settings some more, trying his in different locations, and trying to make sure my original settings remain intact. Amy tries calling the IT guy at the Boston EPA, who says our lack of connection is from the resort’s not entering our IP address into their server. Since I doubt they do this for all their guests, I think this is probably not the case. I call my IT expert and gay lover- if I was gay and he was gay and we were attracted to each other and we were lovers- Robert, who so kindly takes my call and helps me understand that I probably had taken the right steps. He also recommends calling the guys at Apple, who know more than God about technology. (That’s because God was hired by Microsoft.)

After leaving the resort and forcing the kids on another ¾ mile death march through palm tree-lined beaches, we tried the Verizon store I had mentioned earlier. This store was a marked contrast to the internet café – it had no sign announcing its contents, it was manned by a teenaged-looking Dominican guy who seemed to know how the equipment worked, and it was up and running. We asked if I could try plugging my laptop into their system, and he said okay. We got no connection, so Amy and Lane used their computers to check their e-mail, while Benjamin fell asleep on my shoulder. They do have towers which have CD slots, however, so they might be something in an emergency, which this is inching towards, if I need to send an image via CD.

Later in the day we tried the gambling bunker again. It turns out this is a legitimate, government-run operation. It also turns out it is a single windowed cement bunker with two rooms and no furnishings, except for a young woman and man taking turns behind a bank teller’s window, where they take in locals bets on the national lottery. It also turns out this marvelous signal of theirs that my computer picks up is an intranet, with no connection to the internet. We found this out after waiting over ½ hour for the manager in the afternoon, and after Amy ran back there tonight when, while we were trying to avoid blowing ourselves up with the bottle of gasoline that the mercado sold us as charcoal lighter fluid, the young man from the bunker showed up on his motorbike and announced that the manager we have been looking for for two days was in the bunker and we could see him. Amy said he was nice, and that he would like to help us except that it is an intranet, although they may expand it sometime soon. We have been here enough to know that soon translates into sometime in the next 5 years. He also mentioned something that has been said a couple times, and may be my next trouble – even if they did allow us access to their network, they would be afraid of us using too much bandwidth, as the networks in the Samana Peninsula are almost all satellite-based, which means the bandwidth isn’t too much to begin with.

I hope and wish that I’m able to remember and write the NON-technology events of our days soon. I worry that Lane and Benjamin will remember the DR as the place that we couldn’t get the internet.

I also worry that folks like me are ruining the world – we expect the comforts of home in every corner of the world we visit, and the need to create these comforts ruins the local cultures.

We asked someone about the gunshots we thought we heard last night. They said yes, those were gunshots. The local (regional?) baseball team had won the national championship in Santo Domingo, sending them to the Caribbean World Series.

TODAY’S BIG THOUGHT: have dogs outnumbered their usefulness to the planet?