Stuffy Sunday

[howeird]

The weather was glorious all day, but I did not get to see much of it from 1 till 4:30. Not that I would have enjoyed it much with a Dayquil buzz on and a stuffed up head.

I spent the afternoon at the home of a couple of friends, both of them lovely people and fairly tech savvy from a user's perspective, setting up their new wireless router (they did not have one before), installing a wireless card in their downstairs PC and helping set up their new PC so it could "easy transfer" data from their old PC.

It was a mitigated success.

Wireless router:
They bought the same D-link router I have which does b,g and n, and should be very configurable via a web browser. After explaining how I was going to change the base IP address, and also show them how to see who is logged into the network, I tried to connect manually on their XP machine, but it had three flavors of firewall software incompletely installed, which prevented me from doing anything through the browser. So I resorted to the CD, which let me set everything up automatically, and I was able to get to the browser's admin page, but it would not let me *do* anything there. By way of demonstration, I connected my cell phone to their network and its browser let me see guests, but it was too awkward to make the big changes. After some thought, I figured with WPA2 security and D-link's non-intuitive IP address assignment scheme, they would be okay.

Wireless card:
So, downstairs, installed the matching D-link PCI card in another XP machine, tried to install that, but the wireless mouse buttons stopped working. Interrupt conflict, I guess. We plugged in a USB mouse, and I was able to finish the network card install and get them online, but they will need to re-install the mouse drivers (and probably download new ones) to fix that problem. And I needed to explain that the "wireless" in wireless mouse was a different wireless than in wireless network card.

Not so Easy Transfer:
Back upstairs, set up the new PC in parallel with the old one, started running "Easy Transfer" on it, followed the instructions on the old (XP) machine to download the program and run it. Got the secret code from the old machine, entered it on the new one, and it failed to connect. Checked all the basic networking stuff, then had the new (WIn 7) machine dump its version of the transfer program onto a USB drive, slapped that into the old machine, ran it and got a secret code in an entirely different format. Entered that in the new PC and left them with it running like a champ across the new router. I figure 2-4 hours. And I explained that it only transfers files and settings, they will have to re-install any software they want to use. That will be a project for them.

It took way too long, but the only time I looked like a complete idiot was when I managed to snap off one of the little plastic shims on the back of the keyboard and lose it completely. They prefer the keyboard to lay flat, so that was a non-issue.


Rewarded myself with a mocha frapp at Starbucks, and met Janice there for a chat. Janice introduced me to the friends with the new PC.

Home, Tom Ka Gai and dim sum for dinner. Fudgesickle for dessert.

Not feeling up to making pickles. Will hit the sack early, maybe make pickles tomorrow afternoon. BASFA will depend on how this cold goes, and whether Moto really calls me for an 8 am Tuesday interview.