I'm finally back online --www, mail, etc. -- with DSL. The downtime was actually fairly short -- a week and a half -- and would have been shorter if the guy on ebay sent the DSL modem when he said he would. But everything worked flawlessly -- you have to admire a system where I can plug a generic patch cable and generic phone cable into a modem I got from some guy in Jersey, call up my ISP and get six sets of numbers (two IPs, netmask, gateway, two DNS servers) and just like that be another permanent node that anyone around the world can see.
(Originally posted elsewhere)