My wireless network here at home has a whole twelve feet to cross. Granted, there is a wall to traverse, but still, the various nodes of my network have much more trouble staying in contact than they should. This morning it was especially bad, nothing was coming through from the internet at all. Ping tests revealed that the wireless connection was extremely intermittent. It was fine last night, and it’s been fine for a while, so I figure it must be interference from either some neighbor’s newly acquired electronics, or some atmospheric condition combined with solar flares and government conspiracy to create subspace anomalies and warp my CDs.

So, naturally I turned to the paranoid-delusional’s headwear of choice, aluminum foil. I put a wall of foil alongside each wireless device, on the side facing away from the rest of the network. Et voilà, the connection has been going great guns ever since.

And speaking of foil, it’s time for fencing. Huzzah!

I am so sick of stuff not working on my stupid computers. Now my secondary machine, the one I use for storage of music and old data I care about, is all frotzed. It won’t boot at all, it says that one of NT’s system files is missing or corrupt. And I can’t repair or upgrade NT on it, apparently, because NT Setup can’t even find any hard drives. I had to stop trying, because if I don’t take a break I’ll probably end up taking a pickaxe to the thing.

This is the direct result of a power outage of about three seconds, which happened last week, hot on the heels of a whole slew of DSL connection problems. Add in the perpetual file transfer failures of unknown cause, being forbidden to send email from my main address using anything but webmail, and the black cloud of haplessness surrounding tmbg.net for the past few months, and it all totals up to a very frustrating digital experience overall. I swear, the Amish lifestyle has never looked so appealing.

I’m in the process of harvesting files from my old Mac, in preparation for getting rid of it. I’m having to use floppies to transfer anything I want to keep, so that’s forcing me to be pretty selective. It’s just as well, I have no reasons beyond sentiment to keep anything.

However, I am definitely keeping all the old letters to friends, and the homemade graphics, and even some college papers and other writings. I haven’t looked at a lot of this in a very long time, and I am glad to have the chance to see it now.

This’ll be the first time since 1984 that I haven’t owned some sort of Apple computer. I’m not quite nostalgic enough to keep this one around, though. It’s a Performa, which was bad enough when it worked. The modem and ethernet card are both dead, and for years it hasn’t displayed any red in its colors.