mood adjustment

I was feeling very grumpy last night. I got a hole drilled to reduce the run of ethernet cable across our floor, and I wasn’t happy with it. I looked for a simple way to give network service to the AV equipment across the room from my Airport. Basically, I want a hub that bridges back to the Airport, but everything seems to indicate that this is either expensive or inconvenient. If I want to use a wireless bridge, I have three choices.

I can use access points with “bridge mode.” To use bridge mode, I will need two APs in bridge mode, which means that neither will accept clients. That means buying and installing two more APs. Expensive APs can mix AP and bridge mode, but that doesn’t really help me.

I can get a hub and a wireless bridge, and plug the bridge (which will act as a client) into the hub. This is mostly just inconvenient, because it gives me two things to plug in. I am already short on sockets on that side of the room.

I can get a “wireless gaming adapter” (another kind of bridge) for each device. This would work, but would require even more power outlets and cost a pile of money.

The current solution seems to be running a cable across the room. Hopefully it will not be too much of an eyesore. I’ll run it to a hub over by the Xbox and hope for the best. I’m looking forward to having a house in which I can more freely cable things.

Anyway, having made that decision I did some more wire-organizing, rerunning some cables on the TV. I found some stupid things, like a twelve foot set of RCA cables connecting the VCR to the TV, when they were about eighteen inches apart. Things seem a bit neater back there, now, and I’ve set the TV up so that we can do real PIP again.

Having that working again, I’ve started to wonder when I’ll be able to buy a cheapish multi-tuner TiVo, preferably one that can record multiple programs at once. It’d be nice if they could at least make multiple TiVos in one house coordinate recording schedules.

Trevor didn’t cancel his service yet, so I couldn’t activate mine, so I got annoyed that I was adding Season Passes that would almost certainly be deleted when I updated.

Then I got a call from work that the server had crashed again, for the fifth day in a row at the same time. Argh!

Today, I am feeling less grumpy. I walked over to the ATM this morning to deposit some checks and decided that I’d be a little late for work and walk down the block for a bagel. I got a hot plain bagel slathered with butter, and it was good. So far, work has been so-so, but it just needs to not get worse and I’ll be OK with my day.

One other note… when I see this message in your email messages, you immediately lose my respect. I know this is unfair, but my brain is just wired that way:

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Written on January 26, 2005