Category: Techno Bob

My obsessive side came out big time during the past week. My cable modem fried, pushing me offline for several days, which made me pretty damned jittery. Think cigarette addict miles from the nearest smoke. I finally picked up a new modem from the folks at Comcast and hooked it up. Nothing. My wireless network was dead as Michael Jackson’s career.

So I started tinkering. I was getting a signal from my Apple Airport Extreme. I could see my computers on the network. But I could break out to the Internet.

And I tinkered some more. I found a note in the modem documentation saying I needed a crossover cable to connect the modem to the wireless access point. Went out and bought one. Still couldn’t get out ot the Net.

I could, however, hit the Net when I ran a cable straight to my computers. I just couldn’t get it wirelessly. So I tried another wireless router I had in a closet. Then another.

After a day and a half, it finally started working. I have no idea how or why. I was tinkering. I rebooted and bang. The deus ex machina of technology made everything right. I’m now using a Linksys setup instead of the Apple Extreme. But I don’t care. My Tivo can talk to my Mac and my Mac can talk to my PCs and everyone can romp around on the Internet.

I’m thinking about switching this blog to Movable Type. Here’s an unformatted test copy I’ve been playing with. Let me know what you think. Just to entice you to click, I’ve put a post there about zombies and Cuban cigars.

Yesterday was one of those rare days when everything I did worked on the first try.

— My Big Green Egg was sick, and I needed to replace a carriage bolt that holds the lid on. I went to the hardware store, bought numerous variations of carriage, nut, bolt, washer … you name it … expecting to have to do a lot of slogging to make it work. When I got back, the first one I picked out worked, and I was eating mesquite smoked trout within a few humble hours. Praise the Big Green Egg.

— I needed a few screws for the hot and cold water knobs in the shower above the garage. Again, I chose several variations of screw, hoping to stumble upon the right one. When I got home, the first package I opened worked perfectly.

— After considerable debate at the hardware store, I picked a tarp to cover my woodpile. Would 20×12 be big enough? Yup. Perfect.

— The furnace stopped working yesterday. After much fretting and swearing, I broke down and checked the air filter. Dirty. Clogged. After I cleaned that sucker, I said, let there be heat. And there was heat.

— Joanne sent me a “God” detector, a small, compass-like device that measures god’s presence. As soon as I pulled it out of the package. The dang thing went nuts. Hmmm.

— And finally, I fixed this blog this morning. After I upgraded my server plan, nothing worked. After a bit of tinkering this a.m., I figured out the problem. Some root paths had changed in the migration. The path to perl had shifted. And bang. It was fixed.

Today I’m going to build a fire, read James Joyce and hide. Nothing good can happen after yesterday’s windfall …