Fri Jul 22 - Work was work, but the salad and soup buffet for the students was quite yummy. So free lunch was great, and free dinner packed for later.

I'm *so* glad that I had that dinner with me when I was stuck on the highway in heat and traffic. I probably spent about an hour traveling only 5-10 miles or so along the coast, in a stretch of highway where there are no exits or roads on which I could even *think* about escaping. When you're completely parked, it is really easy to eat a salad that is poised neatly on the passenger seat.

* * * * *
One good thing about the internet and a phone is that you never have to drive all over town looking for an item any more. Because we're finally moving furniture in this weekend, and it was payday today, I realized that I really need to get a wireless router this afternoon (because I really shouldn't sit in my roomie's bedroom to use my own computer). I started out with one idea about which router to buy and from where. But after researching several comparison sites, router reviews from customers, and the retail websites of several stores, I found something significantly cheaper, and had it narrowed down to an office supply store near work and the exact model and brand that I wanted. Got the router, and got on the road. And sat and sat and sat in traffic, enjoying my dinner salad, radio, and air conditioning.

Installing the router was not nearly as easy as I would have liked, but their tech support was fairly decent. Well, that is, when my cell reception wasn't completely giving out or when there wasn't a plane flying overhead. Have I mentioned we're directly in the flight plan of a major local airport? Yes. That made things fairly interesting.

The main issue with the router was simply that I needed to use one security setting over another, learn how to hard-reset the router when things simply stopped working entirely, reboot a lot, set (and reset) the ip address setting several times, reboot the laptop, switch back and forth between a (working) wired LAN connection and the wireless that I was trying to engage....

I'm happy to say I'm sitting in my own bedroom, typing on my own laptop, connected by a wireless signal, with security successfully configured. *whew* It took probably an hour or an hour and a half, from start to finish including three calls to tech support, two successfully closed tickets, and um, that's about that.

I think I'll go take a walk to the Borders around the corner, buy a coffee, and walk back. Then I can get some more stuff from my old apartment. I need a break, and I hope to see that my connection still works even after I walk away from my laptop for a while.