goblinbox

In which universe does this make any sense?

Okay, so I don’t really know how wi-fi works. I assume it’s some sort of transmitter/receiver relationship like radio or old-style television. I figure there needs to be an appropriate amount of proximity and an inversely appropriate lack of obstacles between the two stations, but once you’ve got a device that’s transmitting and a device that’s receiving, it should just work barring interference on the same frequency, right?

So why does my wi-fi signal degrade over time?

I have a cheap-ass Encore wireless DSL modem. It’s in the guest bedroom, which is at the front of the house. I do 99% of my computing from my bedroom, which is upstairs and at the opposite end of the house.

I can get online just fine most of the time; but then everything gets really shitty. I can barely surf, let alone watch vids on Netflix (which is, yes, my main use of my connection these days. So sue me). If I run a tracert, the first hop – between my computer and my modem – takes FOR. FUCKING. EVER.

And here’s where it gets weird: no standard troubleshooting (refresh wifi adapter, reboot computer, reboot modem, etc.) has any effect whatsoever, BUT if I just carry the netbook down to the router I can then put it back where it started and it WORKS JUST FINE for a week or more.

In my room I get two bars. Next to the modem, duh, I get five. All I have to do is get the netbook close to the router for a few minutes and my problems are solved for days. I have experienced this phenomenon too many times to dismiss it as coincidence. I don’t have to reboot anything, or even reconnect: I just have to get physically closer for a few minutes and my connection stabilizes for up to a week.

My question is this: WTF, over?

In which there’s a totally awesome t-shirt!

Last week, VUBOQ posted a picture of his new bedazzled Storm Trooper t-shirt and I was totally all OMFGWTFBBQ!!!1! THAT IS SO BITCHIN’!!! and you know what he did?

HE SENT ME ONE!!!:

In which I tell you technical crap you probably don’t care about.

I’m trying to move this site from one of LISCO’s old Cobalts over to the outsourced server. Thing is, the site’s got a secure form on it and I don’t really know shit about SSL/HTTPS. I activated SSL on the new server, fine. But the secure form? Was built in FrontPage, which I loathe and hate. And which, incidentally, doesn’t seem to be allowed to connect to the secure folder on the target server. If I disable FP extensions so I can connect using FTP to upload the form, it won’t work. But I can’t seem to upload it with FP.

Good thing I enjoy a challenge.

I’m also the webmistress for the Amma Fairfield Satsang. I let both of its domains expire because I couldn’t find my fucking login for 000domains.com, which is where I registered the domains. I finally got in (more or less accidentally) and renewed them, but now one of the sites can’t find it’s MySQL database, probably due to some DNS problem and/or some side effect of the domain having been disabled. Believe me, this is a total pain in the ass, especially since I can’t remember the cPanel login nor the FTP login. They should both be saved in my password app, but they’re not. Which means either that I’m a slob or that I accidentally overwrote the app’s db when synching with my PPC. Ugh.

Technology, as much as I adore it, does not really make things easier.

In other news, it’s fucking nice outside and I absolutely love not being cold. I love rolling out of bed without wincing and shivering. I love standing outside the back door while brushing my hair. I love Iowa in the spring, it’s so balmy and sweet.

And for no reason whatsoever, this is a picture of some farmer’s random spring brush fire I drove past the other day:

In which you get to see my desktop!

I haven’t posted a pic of my desktop in like a thousand million quadrillion years, so here it is:

(Click to embiggen.)

I’m running Windows2kPro with WindowBlinds and Iconoid. Can’t remember where I got the wallpaper from.

Goddamn I’m cute.

In which I totally drool over obsolete electronic devices!

OMG, you guys, OMG I totally want this:

• eBay: One of Every Apple Newton Made! 2000 2100 eMate & MORE!

It’s the Newton Museum‘s entire collection! One of every single model of Newton ever made, plus a bunch of software!

I used to carry a Newton or two, back in the day. They were cute, cute, cute! I had storage cards, cases, even tiny little keyboards – the Newton will always have a place in my heart. The opsys was adorable. And the easter eggs! And the handwriting recognition!

Go win me that auction. I’m so worth it. *wink*

In which I absolutely gush about an electronic device you don’t give a shit about.

I haven’t been doing much with the blog these past two days because I’ve been playing with my new iPod. Doin’ stuff like finding missing music and putting it back in my collection, adding album art, updating tags, putting anything redneck into a folder to go on Brett’s iPod (he got my old mini) etc. etc. etc. It’s fairly labor-intensive.

Oh, plus work’s been busy too, but whatever. RDSL installations, cross-connections, DSLAM ports, customers wanting to have me walk them through changing their damn email settings (LOOK IT UP ON THE FUCKING SUPPORT SITE, THAT’S WHAT IT’S THERE FOR!), employees calling me to look port numbers or circuit IDs up for them: whatEVer. Back to iTunes.

My music library is so hot. It’s all organized and tagged and shit ~ I can hardly stand myself. (Good thing there aren’t any busses in this town, because I’d probably get hit by one the minute I step outside: that’s how nice my ID3 tags are.)

In which it’s actually my own damn fault.

Apparently I let my computer auto-dial the long distance number to my ISP from 8/21 through 9/10.

This is so unlike me. I mean, I work at an ISP, I know better than to call Fairfield when I can call Douds for free. I only ever dial the Fairfield POP to troubleshoot connectivity problems!

Anyway, long story short: my phone bill, usually less than $30 per month, is $225.45 this month.

Fuck. Me.

In which you can see my hard drives. Seriously.

Look! Here’s part of my desk – my work table, actually – at work.

And that’s five hard drives sitting on it. One’s my back up drive, one’s Buzzdoctor’s drive that I currently have data on, one’s toast, one’s my home drive, and the other is just some random drive I have sitting on my desk.

Okay, yeah, also please note I don’t work tomorrow and my home machine is apart. This means I may not blog or IM or check email. for a few days. Please continue to love me just the way you do.

In which my computer shits the bed and makes me really mad, considering all the crap I’ve been through with my work computer this past month.

Friday night, Brett asked me to get on the ‘net and look up the board track races in Davenport. Having no idea what “board track” races were, I surfed for ‘raceway’ and ‘speedway’ and didn’t find out anything.

In the background, I was importing songs into iTunes – I’d received the CDs and books I’d gotten from Shigeki‘s awesome gift certificate. At some point, my CD-ROM drive stopped responding, and Windows quit, and then it got wonky so I rebooted.

And when Win2kPro came back up, I couldn’t log in. It didn’t accept my password.

So I tried logging in as administrator, and it wouldn’t take that password either. I went to bed.

I spent hours over the rest of the weekend trying to get back in, but I couldn’t. Here at work today I have my home HDD in my bag, and I’m going to pop it into my USB enclosure and see if I can’t back my files up onto my work machine. Then I’ll have to reinstall Windows on the dumb thing and start over.

Snivel, bitch, complain.
——–

I’ve been using Firefox exclusively, and I hate what IE does when I run it so much that I haven’t been bothering to check my templates for IE backwards-compatibility.

Which means I didn’t even know until just now that several of my WordPress templates render improperly in IE!

Why didn’t anybody tell me! Ack! I feel like the worst webmistress ever. I’ll be running this teal style until I get time to make my other styles work in Internet Exploder.

Since my phone hasn’t been holding a charge for more than three hours at a time, and Brett’s has been rather sketchy in the functioning department for lo these many moons now, we stopped by the kiosk at Walmart in Ottumwa today and got new phones.

It took well over an hour.

You can get Lasik surgery in less time than it takes to re-up your freaking wireless contract, fer chrissakes. Why can’t they scan the box, scan your driver’s license, activate the damn phones and take your money? Why is it that as soon as you select a phone and a plan, the clerk glazes over in a hell of never-ending paperwork? It’s not rocket science, it’s selling phones.

We got LG VX6100 phones, the US Cellular version with no sliding lens cover, and we’re pretty happy with them. They’re cute as hell. They have speaker phone capability, Internet access, and built-in digital cameras. (Brett keeps trying to get me to let him take a picture of my boobs, but I ain’t going for it. No way, no how.)

They didn’t have the proper cable to transfer my phone book from my old phone to my new one, so I’ll have to transfer them all by hand. They could have transferred Brett’s numbers, but he didn’t have his old phone with him so he opted to move his himself rather than drive back to Ottumwa. I had no sympathy for him whatsoever when he whined, “Isn’t there an easier way to do this?”

Brett took a chainsaw to the tree that crushed his old Ford. Now he wants to know if I’ll run the chipper, if he goes to 1-Stop to rent one. Run the chipper? I HAVE STREP THROAT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. I’m going to take a nap. He’ll probably have forgotten he even wanted to do it by the time I wake up.

Amma is coming to Mt. Pleasant next week, so people in the satsang have left messages that they need me to do things – edit this web site or that one, fix data in the seva database, be places…. I’d better get my nap in and get my ass to town this evening. Hopefully this chipping scenario will just go away on its own. I’m still tired. From the strep. Yeah, from the strep.
—–

I’ve migrated my good ol’ blog to WordPress.

Why?

Why not. Seemed like something to do.

Actually, that’s a lie. I did it because WP has more and cooler style templates, and because – unlike MT – it’s free. I’ll probably migrate the whole site to WP since it was so blessedly easy.

Off to play with it to see what it does…

Oh, the original blog still exists here if you should want to view it.