We're going wireless today. Hot Damn!
This will be awesome later on today, when it's up and running and I can
blog from the front lawn with a frosty beverage in the cupholder on my
lawn chair. But until then, it's a minor pain in the ass. It's like I
stopped myself from sitting on a cactus a minute before major pain
ensued: I've got a sticker or two in my butt: easily remedied, but a
bit annoying and slightly painful in the meantime.
About a week ago, the husband contacted Qwest, our DSL provider, and
chatted with them about upgrading our modem. He's been having issues
for about a month now with our network. Every time I click on a
webpage, his
mouse locks up. Knowing how much I surf on a daily basis, well, let's
just say that the husband was close to spontaneously combusting a few
times. He couldn't figure out what was causing this. The guru had a
virus hit his computer at the end of June (something which only rarely
happens---like once every four years) and he took it perhaps a little
too personally. He wound up cleaning too much off his machine.
Included in the lost items was a small command that kept his mouse from
freezing whenever I instructed wee bastard to go out into the vast
wasteland that is the internet and return with a web page. The only
solution his techie buddies could give him was to buy a wireless router
and start over. So, the husband decides that to do this, he needs to
get a new modem. That was fine with the husband, though, because he
wanted to upgrade the DSL service, too. More bang for the buck. Qwest
has a habit of annoying us in this regard: we don't want caller-id, but
they keep trying to sell us that function. We do want faster DSL, but
did they call us and let us know about their new offer of 1.5megs of
bandwidth for ten bucks cheaper than what we're currently paying?
Nooooooooo. Fortunately, the husband made the call, got us the better
deal, but it's only saving us seven bucks a month---because we're
"leasing" our new modem for two years at the bargain basement price of
$3 a month. Woooo. The new modem arrived a couple of days ago, and low
and behold, what should make the husband's eyes pop out of his head but
the fact that the modem also doubles as a wireless router! This means,
in the scheme of things, that all he now has to do is buy a wireless
PCMCIA card for wee bastard, I will be mobile and the upgraded
networking of the office will be complete. Well, for the time being,
anyways. He has to purchase a wireless PCMCIA card for his
laptop, too, but that ain't in the budget right now. He will have to
forgo the ability to surf from two computers simultaneously for a month
or so. He's hitting CompUSA after he goes to a meeting this afternoon.
Why is this annoying in the meantime? you ask. Well, I'm currently
using Gandalf, the husband's computer, to write this post. I have no
internet to Wee Bastard because Qwest cut off our old DSL connection to
insall the new one. This means that our old networking no longer works,
hence no internet to Wee Bastard until the husband gets home with the
new wireless networking card. I have no email, because msn is slammed
today and when I go to the hotmail site, it won't pull anything new.
But there are also other, pettier annoyances. The husband's computer
has an old-fashioned keyboard, which is driving me NUTS as every other
word of this post has had a typo in it, and hence had to be corrected.
He's also using Mozilla/Firefox as his browser and all of the webpages
I visit daily are rendering in odd ways. The main complaint, as you
might have guessed, is that this computer isn't mine,
and that bothers me. Despite the trouble Wee Bastard has given me over
the years, he's still mine. For better or worse, I love that prickly
wee bastard and using another computer with a different keyboard,
accessing webpages that don't come up correctly is making me feel like
I'm cheating on him and the problems are my reward for getting a little
somthing on the side. I'm an adulteress of the computer kind. Replete
with guilty conscience and a prayer offered up that I will never, ever
cheat again. I swear.
Anyhoo, I'll be wireless by the end of the day, providing the husband
buys the proper stuff at CompUSA and doesn't have to run back to the
store a few times to get things right. Yet, other than surfing from
whereever, the best part about this is that I will finally be equal
with my mother in terms of computing mobility. The woman's been
wireless since January, which in the overall scheme of things---I'm her
daughter, I'm younger, and am supposed to be the hip one in this
relationship---just isn't right. Things will go back to normal this
afternoon, and that will allow me to breathe a sigh of relief that I'm
no longer a lame-o. Anyway, there's your post for the day. You might
get something later. You might now. I'm fickle that way.