At 3am today I reached over the pillow to check my email.

And found that my n900, which claimed to be connected to my wifi, couldn't get any signal.

Small panic. On and off through the night, I checked. No wifi. It's hard to sleep when you're hyperventilating.

At 7, in my nightie and without my eyesight I rebooted the modem. Still no internet via wifi.

It took me till 8am and half dressed to realise that I could use the n95 (on the other bedside) to check the wifi signal. Nope... it was dead.

The relief washed over me. The whole internet to the house was dead - not just my n900! After walking the dog, checking things on the other computers and a long call to the ISP, I'm pleased to be able to tell you my device is functioning perfectly. It's the exchange that's down! And may be off for a few days. Thank goodness for other methods of connecting... n900s and dongles.

So, anyone else had a panic attack only to find the device was fine and somethinge else was crook?

And anyone else feel that sense of panic when it doesn't work?

I frequently "forget" to pay my cable bill. When the internet doesnt work I automatically call them and pay. It actually went out once and I called them and paid and then they told me they didnt disconnect it. I restarted the router and everything was back to normal. lol.

Hope they credited you with the extra!

I always, always reboot everything first, on principle. When I pop off, I swear they'll reboot me to see if they can get me working! The poor guy at the ISP started his spiel and I said "No, the modem is broadcasting and connecting to the computers fine, it's not getting an internet signal acording to the various lights on the front. I've rebooted twice and done a full reset with no change."

He was quite crestfallen that all the standard things they tell you to try had already been attempted, and he had to look up the line status.

I have a Kindle, which connects to the Internet for free and allows me to check my email and other stuff. I also have a Palm Centro that allows the same. So when there is an outage, I am covered.

Guess what the first thing I do is when an outage happens? I have to look up the Time Warner Cable phone number, which I always forget to write down.

I will be shutting down my Sprint service as soon as I am allowed to contractually, so the Palm Centro connection will be going away (replaced by a T-Mobile connection for my N900). But the Kindle connection is forever, or until further notice, anyway.

What I always do when my Internet is down is disconnect my cable modem for awhile and plug it back in. Then, after I call tech support, they always ask me to do the same thing, again.

I also try the Free Internet Chess Server over my computer, because I have sometimes found it works when everything else is down! I guess this means that DNS related things are down, but other services are still up and Time Warner Cable is doing some kind of maintenance.

But it doesn't do me much good to have the Free Internet Chess Server working, unless I feel like a quick game of chess, or of course I could shout out a question, such as "my Time Warner Cable is down! Anyone here with the same problem?"

Huh, and i thought i was addicted.
For me, internet outage (unfortunately quite rare) turns out to be an opportunity to do useful stuff

If the internet line get's cut I usually try all the "Standard" crap other than rebooting the router since it's an OpenBSD box and not some crappy soap box style thingy.

Then I call them... see what's happening... and go read a book or two... And generally don't care

And yes I was addicted... 2 years being cold turkey solved that for me

You check your email throughout the night? I think your wifi router if the least of your problems...

my job is about problem solving and helps keep my mind active. so when i have a problem at home i start doing the usual.
one time msn wouldn't log on for me. i checked the server was up. disabled firewall to test that. still no answer, logged on to both routers and checked the ports being forwarded, checked the logs. still nothing. reinstalled msn, still nothing. deleted it and removed all registry entries. installed it again. still nothing.
i'm going nuts at this stage. i log on my phone so it is working just not on my pc. checked all updates, and .net versions etc. reinstalled them. still the same problem. so when i've googled the error code, done all the things people have done. and more! i was giving up for the nite. i noticed the date was wrong on my pc. That was the problem. i had accidently put the year forward on the pc clock and that stopped msn from logging in.

I tend to wake in the night and started going over problems I can't possibly solve at silly o'clock and then I get stressed out. Checking mail, reading twitter and even logging in here for 10 minutes distracts me, and I can go back to sleep.

*Checks time-stamp*

Right.

are you going to make n900 teddy? i'm sure people would buy an n900 plushy or pillow to hug at night