me and some friends had a camping trip planned for months. we paid a bunch of money for some camp ground, right next to a river.

we had all kinds of plans for the weekend. lots of music, booze, fishing and swimming.

on the first day there, while walking down a hill towards the river to go swiming, the sandy dirt started to slide, causing me to lose my balance. i was wearing flip-flops, and besides not providing a lot of traction, they also don’t stay on your feet that well.

so while twisting and turning, trying to regain my balance so i wouldn’t fall, i ended up twisting my legs and falling on my foot, causing a loud crack sound to happen.

most of the people near me heard the “crack” sound since it was so loud, and thought i had stepped on a fallen tree and broken a tree branch off or something.

i couldn’t make it back up the hill since i couldn’t get any traction, and a friend slid and fell when he tried to pull me up as well. two friends eventually lifted me up and were able to walk me back up the hill. they then laid me on a picnic table.

we had no cell phone signal where we were at, so 911 calls were a bit difficult. eventually they backed a minivan up to the table, so i could be loaded into the back of it. they drove me down to the camp registration building, where we were met by an ambulance that took me to the hospital.

i broke my ankle on thursday, i had surgery friday to put a metal plate in my leg and a bunch of metal screws, and saturday i started physical therapy.

ive had issues every now and then with dealing with routers…

i guess it started back in 2000 or so when i got DSL.

- when i first got my “PieceOfShit SpeedStream 4060 USB” DSL Modem. i used something like “WinGate” software to share the connection over my network. WinGate or whatever its called didnt like closing connections. refreshing a server list in Half-Life only was able to ping half the servers since the WinGate’s NAT table was full or some shit. it left a connection open to each IP address it pinged and didnt disconnect. Half-Life couldnt ping anymore IPs because all connections were full.

- i didnt have to deal with that for too long, because in 2001, i got a SpeedStream 5260 DSL modem. the 5260 used with the “RASPPPOE” software was a lot better than the USB modem and its shitty proprietary software. i still had to deal with Windows handling all connections (so a PC had to be up and running 24/7 for all other network stuff to work), but i could use things like the Windows built in Internet Connection Sharing to have it act as a router, which worked better than the 3rd party internet sharing/DHCP software i used before.

- a lot of 5260 modems were just 5660 Routers with cippled firmware. lucky for me, my 5260 was really a 5660. flashing it with 5660 firmware enabled router-like features like PPPoE Dialer, DHCP, NAT/firewall/port forwarding stuff, etc. that paired with a cheap hub made a somewhat decent router.
it had issues with resolving DNS though. visiting a site ive been to before the same day would sometimes just totally fail. “unable to find site xxx” or whatever. some games couldnt connect either through it.

- in 2002, i got a Netgear RT314. i purchased it refurbished direct from Netgear. i got one after using the same model at work and seeing all that it could do. it could forward whole ranges of ports, had a Dynmic DNS updater built in, a friendlier web interface, and it of course was a “real” switch, and not a “dumb” hub/repeater like i had been using (better for general PC to PC network traffic). it also was reported by a lot of people to work just fine with all kinds of games.

the Netgear RT314 served me and my family for a long time.

…fast forward to when BitTorrent came out. opening lots of connections with a Torrent made my whole internet connection just DIE. i tried limiting connections and messing with settings, but the Netgear RT314 would just throw up when any number of connection attempts were made with BitTorrent.

no matter what i use, something is always lacking. i had been going with Windows XP w/ its Firewall acting as my home’s router. but after playing with various installs of Linux and x64 Windows (and my computer rebooting several times a day, which of course prevented it from working as good router), i had my Netgear RT314 set up to act as the router. i just queued up a bunch of torrents last night and had to deal with the network going down for everyone because of the Netgear throwing a fit, so i have my 5660 Modem acting as the router right this second. so far, so good.