Terribly exciting evening. A brief flickering of the lights followed by ... no light whatsoever.

But our neighbours had lights? It turns out the tree over the road had taken out one of the power cables which was lying in the road live (and unplugged).

Pretty prompt service from the electricity department. They were here in about half an hour and sorted it out in just a few minutes. Looked to be a lone soldier too. Kudos to whoever you were. It was blustery, wet and cold out this evening.

Our extremely friendly neighbours (who we've never quite managed to get around to actually visiting in the nearly 6 months we've been here) invited us round for coffee since they still had power. So we chatted for a bit and invariably (this always seems to happen) I got sucked into assisting him install and configure a modem. Plug and pray and a few random clicks and reboots later and the modem was installed. Dialing up seemed fine but Outlook Depress failed with one of it's enlightening error messages (something in the 10,000 range so I presume one of the standard Windows comms messages but how this is supposed to help my grandmother I have no idea).

It was a Windows 98 box, so no real networking tools to speak of (not even something like nslookup). But ping resolved the POP3 host name without problems. Eventually I figured out that for some reason Outlook Depress thought the SMTP server and POP3 server would both be listening on the same port. Oh, and it seemed to default to port 3 for some ungodly reason.

The final hurdle was guessing (dontcha love ISPs?) that the dialup username and the mailserver username were different (and then guessing how one derives the latter from the former).

I have always hated dialup configuration. Most of the time it's a black art and with an OS like Windows 98 you really are a bit of a masochist. Hell, setting up a wireless ADSL modem is simpler than standard dialup.