Well, this weekend we put a lot of work into converting my old office (the smaller bedroom in our two-bedroom house) into a nursery, and brought my desk and bookshelves into our master bedroom (and now office). I like the new arrangement quite a bit, except one minor problem…

Actually, it’s a major problem insofar as it’s driving me nuts. I don’t want to go into a long explanation but we have a lot of devices hooked up to our household network. The problem is that we did not put an Ethernet jack on the wall where we now have the desk. For whatever reason, I thought I had a simple solution in the form of a wireless network card. Cue the insanity.

I plugged in my formerly decommissioned Netgear wireless router, purchased back when these things used to be quite difficult to set up. It should have been setup previously but it was collecting dust for about five years, so I wasn’t too surprised when my computer could “see” it but couldn’t connect. And it was frustrating but not surprising when the thing kept refusing the username and password for setup, even though I reset it to the factory settings. Apparently, this is a common occurrence with this model of old router—when it gives up the ghost, it permanently locks you out. Terrific.

So I bought a new router, planning on returning it before the 30-day return policy runs out. The new one sets up in about five minutes and both laptop and computer connect. Perfect! Until I try to secure the network. The wireless cards I have are also five years old and they don’t want to play nice with the new security features. Except they don’t want to play nice with the old security features either.

Today, the first day I’m really working on this computer, I realize that there are a number of random sites that timeout for no apparent reason—Hotmail, Facebook, and some of the live score broadcasts from footie websites. Not good. It isn’t a browser problem and Googling reveals this is one of the wonderful issues that’s posted about in a million places but never resolved. All I know is that Friday when it was a wired connection, everything was peachy; today, on a wireless connection, everything is not. You be the computer tech and try to isolate the problem…

I have a suspicion that it’s the old, crappy adapter that’s somehow causing sites to hang. Amy suggested I just use the computer downstairs to check those sites but I used to do tech support stuff and I knew—quite rightly—that these are the only problems we’ve found so far. Sure enough, I can’t get into my class records online and I can’t update my website using Dreamweaver. It will, however, connect long enough to corrupt the file on the server and render a page useless. It shoots down Dreamweaver, FireFTP, and even logging into the server and either manually editing the files or uploading new ones. Unbelievable…

This is the kind of crap that will drive you crazy. The problem is difficult to isolate and working through the steps to eliminate problems takes time I don’t have. (sigh)

Unsurprisingly, Spurs lost the Carling Cup to Man Ure. As many fans pointed out on F365’s mailbox, there doesn’t seem to be much point in winning the thing and qualifying for Europe if you then field a C team in the later stages, which Spurs of course did last week and were eliminated (like Aston Villa) by some Eastern European team badly in need of some vowels in their name. But the problem of European competition won’t vex Spurs next year regardless.

/
I watched a good chunk of Villa vs. Stoke and was heartily disappointed at them conceding two goals in the last two minutes after Stoke had hardly managed a shot on goal. The only good news was Ars*nal’s inability to beat Fulham on Saturday, leaving the gap between them at five points.

And the best part about La Liga is that the potential for meltdown is always on the cards. Four months ago, Barcelona were (arguably) head and shoulders the best team in Europe, never mind Spain. Now they haven’t won in ages and Real Madrid are a mere four points behind them. If normal business resumes, Barcelona will right the ship and Madrid will go flat and the title race will threaten to be interesting but, in reality, will peter out. Still, I would have loved to see the cracking 4-3 loss to Atletico Madrid. Damn Dish network for dropping GolTv…

Current Mood: Pretty Tired and Displeased |