Buy a new cable. Will be cheaper than renting an extra place till you find it.
It's a little more complicated because the only cable socket in the wall is in the dining room, so that's where I put the cable modem. The computer is in the master bedroom on the other side of the house, and it's a desktop box that doesn't do wireless. The ethernet cable needs to be at least 50 feet (which we have one of from when WolFish wired me up at the previous place. That's the lost one) or else I need to figure out how coax wiring works so I can put the modem somewhere else.
The house was wired for cable TV but the previous owner was elderly and might not even have had internet. There are four coaxial cable ends sticking up out of the master bedroom floor, but they're all male. The cable modem wire needs a female socket. In the dining room where the female wall outlet is, there's another cable with a male end sticking out of the floor, but it's attached to the wall in such a way that it couldn't be plugged into the female socket.
On top of that, when the cable modem is connected to the wall, the network appears on my phone, but after I log in, I get an infinite loading symbol if I try to connect to any websites. So I guess some further setup is needed even though it's not in the modem instructions, but I don't know if it means the wiring is wrong or if it needs something done from a computer.
I have no idea what I'm doing. I hate this stuff, and I'm not sure where to start so that I can minimize the amount of wrong equipment I buy because I have no idea what I'm doing. Going to try hooking up a laptop and then calling the cable support people. Turning the male end of a coax cable into a female seems like it would be a cheaper option than buying some of the equipment I've read about, like
this for the master bedroom or
this for somehow running internet over the electrical wires.
I have internet at the temp housing until Wednesday anyway.
, and quacks like a 