Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Annie is Smiling
On Monday, Erika told me that Annie smiled a real smile (as opposed to simply a random arrangement of the facial muscles that collate into a smile, or gas ;-) for the first time. Then on Tuesday evening I saw Annie smile at her big sister Vanessa several times -- even the sound of her voice seemed to set her smiling.

As of yet, I haven't been on the receiving end of an Annie smile as yet, but Erika and Vanessa are around her much more than I. I figure it's only a matter of time. ;-)

The Perils of Computer Hubris
Proved once again today that I am not a computer hardware/networking guy. I may be able to install a hard drive, and I can usually find my way around a software application in a few minutes, but playing with networking always seems like I'm playing with fire.

When we had the electrics in the house re-done, I saw to it that we had CAT5 networking cable strung through the house, and into most rooms in the house (with an exception of the washrooms -- there are natural limits to computing I say ;-) One of the female outlets was set into the room for my home office. Being lazy, I had simply strung a 50+ ft length of cable direct from the modem in an adjacent room to the office. I decided finally to do something about changing this ersatz arrangement, and reset the cable arrangements from the router so that the outlet in my office ought to work. But, it didn't. So then I tried to set things back the way they were, but couldn't. All of the wires are labeled, but did I think of noting down their arrangement from the router? Noooooo.

So I ended up re-stringing the CAT5 cable for my office properly through the drop-down ceiling, and reset the cable modem so that it avoided the router. With the help of Carl from Rogers @Home tech support, I got the original, non-router settings back for my system, and finally got things up and running again. No network connection in the rest of the house, but at least my main work machine is connected. Will look into the network again on the weekend.

The other thing I was trying to do was to upgrade the memory on my main computer system, from 128MB to .5GB, using two 256MB memory chips I bought a little while ago. No luck. Then I tried it in my other machine -- no luck there either, so I think the chips may themselves be "bad". Will bring them to the office on Friday for a more professional opinion from Peter L. Somehow, I probably just ended up buying the wrong type of memory chip... (though I had thought this sort of thing was pretty straightforward).

Given all of this, I figure the pernicious gods of computing must be annoyed with me. ;-)