I can’t imagine that there is anyone on the planet aside from me who would ever encounter this obscure scenario, but I thought it was interesting, and you never know, so i’m posting it anyways.

A year or so ago I upgraded my wireless router to a Zyxel X550, and happily threw my old Netgear 614v7 into the closet.  That Netgear router really sucked, i’ll never buy another non-blue box of theirs again, but I digress.  So everything was working peachy, except my desktop PC upstairs which doesn’t have a wireless adapter.  I rent, so I didn’t want to run any wire up there, and since I mainly use my work laptop these days, that PC has just been sitting there unused.  Recently i’ve decided that I need it for a side project, so last night I was shopping for PCI wireless adapters when I got the crazy notion to see if I could rig that old junky Netgear up in client mode and use it as a wireless bridge.

Technically, the 614 does not support client mode out of the box.  Realistically, it barely supports anything other than frustration and anger out of the box.  But 30 bucks is 30 bucks, and I didn’t really want yet another piece of networking hardware in my house if I could avoid it.  My closet is already full of the stuff.

So I did some googling and found an amazingly helpful how-to for the similar Netgear WGT624 by BeatJunkie. This file explains how to force your wireless router to accept telnet connections, after which you can login to it and issue shell commands to change settings that aren’t surfaced through the web interface. One of these is “Client Mode”, which lets the router connect as a client to another wireless AP. In my case, then I’d wire the PC to the client router via ethernet and save myself some cash on a new adapter. AND finally have something useful to do with that crappy netgear router.

So I got it into client mode successfully, and after issuing it a static IP on the Zyxel, everything worked great. Only caveat is that WPA authentication is apparently not supported in client mode, so I had to revert to WEP. Naturally, my mac connected back to the Zyxel with the new settings with no issues, and even my normally finicky HP wifi-enabled printer connected up easily. The PS3 and the Wii both without a hiccup, leaving only Theresa’s HP laptop left to switch to the new settings.

Windows XP does not like shared key WEP by default, so to make this work the key is to go into your wireless connection settings, punch in the SSID for your network, change the authentication type to WEP and “Shared”, type in your WEP key, and then uncheck the box that says “Obtain Key Automatically”. Manually select the key index you chose on your main router (the Zyxel in my case), then connect and everything should just work.

New job, new house in a new state, new car, new EVERYTHING.  Life’s been a little crazy lately, but also a lot of fun.  I’m really enjoying the new job so far, and with the learning potential and challenges ahead it only stands to get better.  I continue to be very pleasantly surprised by how passionate everyone there is about making truly usable, beautiful, accessible, and standardized websites and apps.  That attitude goes a long way toward getting me excited about the future there.  The work they’ve done recently is really genuinely good stuff, equal to just about anything else out there, and superior to a lot of it!  They have some very talented designers and developers, and are bringing more on board all the time.

Virginia is pretty great too, it’s beautiful out here.  Mountains west and north of us, and hundreds of square miles of beautiful greenery in between.

The site re-design has sort of been victimized by the whole moving process,  but every now and then i’ve had a chance to go in and make a little change, most of which have little to no visual impact , but are important nonetheless.  IE6  rendering isn’t as bad as I expected, but there’s still a little housecleaning there to be done.  That’s about as low as i’m going to go on trying to give a browser the full experience, anything older will have to suffer through a little ugliness.  With IE7 out now, 99% of the population really has no excuse to not be using a halfway decent browser, and I don’t feel any responsibility to enable them by making things pretty at the cost of awkward hacks and invalid code.  That’s the real joy of having a personal site, not having to cater to everyone!

There’s still a lot of little WP template issues i’m sure.  Forms on obscure pages I haven’t even looked at yet, etc, so I apologize to anyone happening across any ugliness on here.  I’m working on it!

Well, we’re almost there.  WordPress is up and running (well).  The re-design has been mostly fleshed out and seems functional.  There’s still a lot of tweaking to do for aesthetic purposes, and the sidebar is largely untouched by CSS, so that will change too.  IE7 needs some hand-holding, and I haven’t even looked at IE6 yet.  I’m sure it’s a real mess.  Safari looked decent (on Windows… thanks to the new beta!), and I haven’t checked Opera.

I’m pretty happy with the color scheme and the few graphics.  I like the nice open, airy layout.  Much less “confining” than my previous MovableType templates.  WordPress is a DREAM to code for in comparison.  Getting the site to validate as XHTML Strict on MT would have taken an act of God.  WordPress offered me no resistance at all.  Hopefully in the next few days I’ll have her all polished and pretty.  Comments are welcome, as always.

I have a complete migration to Word Press and re-design from scratch in progress. Please excuse any non-working content or crazy layout issues while this is going on.

I’ve been compulsively using StumbleUpon for a little while now, and every single day, without fail, I still find a half dozen or more really great sites that I probably never would have seen otherwise. My bookmarks have exploded since I started using it.

The first day I installed the toolbar for Firefox, it seemed like every single time I clicked the “Stumble!” button, I was taken to a page that was either extremely useful or cool or both, and that happened probably a good hundred times in a row. I’ve been hooked ever since. It really is a marvelous little toy to tinker with, and I highly recommend it. You can see the pages I’ve liked by viewing my StumbleUpon homepage.

For some time now I’ve had this little javascript “The Secret” banner across the corner of my site’s index. I first watched the movie in July of 2006. I thought it was fantastic, and still do. Since then, it’s had a lot of skeptical press and negativity rained down upon it by about every media outlet on earth. I think they are misunderstanding the film.

Unless you are a really vapid individual, you don’t view The Secret and then start thinking that you can conjure things from midair, which is apparently what these media types are taking from the film. What the film is trying to tell people is that positive people attract positivity into their lives, and that no one ever successfully jumped through a hoop without thinking about successfully jumping through a hoop first. It’s about believing in yourself, and caring enough about the things you want to try and make them happen. The presentation is gorgeous and engaging, and the message is sterling and clear. If you don’t feel energized and excited after watching the movie, your skepticism has murdered your imagination, and you should immediately make every effort to snap out of it and regain some shred of the spark for life you were born with.