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You Don't Always Need a Screwdriver
Don't
know what you've got till it's gone Anyway, it was a stormy eight or nine hours that left my eyeballs feeling like they'd been cleaned with steel wool and my chest like someone with heavy boots had been kicking my sternum off and on since midnight. I mumbled a few appropriate words like, [snurf,whine, wheedle, bitch] "ahhhrrr, ook, gibber," built a nice little fire in the kiva, and went promptly back to bed to preserve what was left of the peace. This action being roundly approved of by all concerned, the next thing I knew, it was a little before 2:00 p.m. and I was leaving Smith's with a can of coffee, artifically-flavored cinnamon rolls [how is that actually possible?], and a disposable long-nosed fireplace lighter. As soon as the clerk had rung up the sale and given me my change, the lights went out all over town. Power failure! All the people with full grocery carts who'd lined up behind me 'cause I was a guy looked severely disappointed and even pissed, but it was awfully dim and I could easily have been mistaken. Out front, the gang from Dave's Custom Cycle who'd been standing beside tarted-up black Harleys collecting donations for holiday charity meals now took up the chant, "Donations for Kit Carson!" That would be Kit Carson Electrical Co-operative, you see. This sort of thing happens often enough that Taoseños automatically treat dead traffic lights like 4-way stop signs, so I got home all right, ate half the "cinnamon" rolls, and waited for the power to come back on. Eventually it did, and I sat down at the computer to fire up Mozilla. HEY! What happened to the Internet?! In my home office, the AirPort base station is connected to the venerable Power Mac 8600 via Ethernet, and usually the AirPort modem makes a connection in 20 seconds or so. This time, nada. One glance at the base station told me something was horribly wrong: its three little colored lights were flashing most unusually, ending with a throbbing triple-orange that did not look right at all. Uh-oh, you don't suppose...? Curse
of the silver demon! I kept trying to resuscitate it anyway. The 8600 was connected via Ethernet, remember, and I had the configuration software on board, so I tried that. Yes! There it was, only all I got were error messages when I tried to reconfigure. There was only one thing left to do, straighten out a paper clip and reset the transmitter. After numerous attempts I seemed to have been successful: the throbbing triple orange changed to a single constant light, and the 8600 reported that the base station had been reset and needed, you know... Well fine, except that it didn't work! The iBook's AirPort Admin Utility still couldn't even see the damned thing anyway, and I began to lapse into panic mode again: Money! Base Station! Money! Base Station! This rapidly morphed into Money! Base Station! Bum! Money! Base Station! Bum! and I knew I was in deep doo-doo. The final stage would be Money! Love! Base Station! Bum!, not necessarily in that order, and then the roof would fall in. Once again I staggered into the living room. The Crisis of the Dead (?) Base Station had already grown to psyche-shattering proportions, and with my sweetie giving me a look that spoke of white coats, injections, and involuntary confinement, the moment was pivotal: "GO FIND YOUR OLD MODEM!" she suggested unprimly, and so I did. Half an hour later I was up and running as in days of yore, and what's more, I quickly found a brand new (old) replacement base station for only $169 at MacResQ and was ready to order. Zombie
love disorder Time passed. (Imagine a blurry image of a clock with hands spinning round and round, then receding into infinity. No? Oh all right, don't imagine, but time did pass, about 90 minutes worth.) I glanced over at the -- HEY, the little green light in the center was on now! I tried the iBook: everything worked. Don't look a gift wireless LAN in the modem, I always say, so I shut everything down, remounted the base station on the wall like I had had it, ethernetted the 8600, moved all the damn cables, shuffled the power supply dongles, etc. AGAIN, and started everything up: triple-orange, triple-orange, triple-orange... Yes, but after about 20 minutes, the little green light in the middle came back on and both Macs were sharing the same Internet connection once again. I may be online, but I still need an analyst. Senior
Applelinks editor and columnist John
H. Farr
lebt immer noch but the prognosis is guarded.
My
BUFFALO LIGHTS is all about giving up
everything to move to the Wild West. Order info and
review links here.
(Current year's columns just below)
"GRACK!" is © copyright 2002, John H. Farr, all rights reserved
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