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sinanjuMy lovely and talented wife nudged me the other day, pointing out that it's been more than three weeks since my last post. Never let it be said I can't take a hint.
In our last exciting episode, we'd attended Orycon and sold the house all in a weekend. We'd packed away most of our household goods in a rented storage pod, on the assumption that it could be weeks or months before we sold the house. Getting an offer the first day it went on sale--and for more than the asking price--was a very pleasant surprise. On the flip side, the buyers wanted the house as soon as possible, necessitating a quick exit.
We're all moved into the new apartment now. We still have boxes to unpack, and settling in to do, along with buying some new furniture--we sold, or gave away, furniture we no longer needed or wanted during the prep work and sale. But we're completely out of the house. I've been busy these last three weeks continuing to clear out the house--disposing of furniture, tools, and accumulated junk in the basement and garage. When I wasn't doing that, I was going through closets and cupboards, boxing up as much as possible in preparation for the actual move. Lots of trips to U-Haul for boxes of various sizes and types. Making calls to arrange for people to show up to take things. Trying (unsuccessfully) to sell some of it on Craigslist.
This past Tuesday two guys from Community Warehouse showed up at the house to take possession of a large quantity of furniture we donated to them. On Thursday, movers arrived at 9 a.m. (just as I returned from dropping Snippy off at the airport for her long-planned trip to San Francisco) to begin emptying the house. Twoson and I supervised while they loaded the truck, then we led them to the new place and unloaded it all into the apartment, again supervising where to place things. All in all it took a little over four hours, and the movers were friendly and efficient. I'd recommend Smooth Move People to anyone.
They didn't take everything. Not everything was ready to be moved. Twoson and I made a number of trips over the course of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, moving one carload at a time. But by Saturday afternoon, we had the very last of our stuff out of the house and in the apartment. We did this while enduring nasty colds (both of us) all the while. That wasn't much fun. Neither was the record, pouring rain during our move.
One of the advantages of owning your own home is that you can drill holes in the floor to run network cabling from room to room through the basement. Aside from the Xbox and Wii, which have wireless dongles, everything else in our network was physically connected to the router. That's not an option in the new apartment, obviously. So we decided to go wireless. I bought a couple of wireless USB adapters for the three PCs.
One of the adapters works flawlessly with Snippy's PC. The same adapter did not work on Twoson's PC; at first because we gave it the wrong security setting (it could see the wireless networks here but couldn't connect to ours because it didn't have the password). That's when I tried it on Snippy's computer, and having figured out what I'd done wrong, used the correct setting. It worked perfectly. But when I tried to reinstall it on Twoson's computer it stubbornly refused to detect any networks at all. (But moved back to Snippy's computer, it still works perfectly.)
The second device didn't work on Twoson's computer either. And neither, of course, will work on mine. I'm running linux, and getting a wireless adapter to interface with my computer is a task beyond my understanding, at least so far. It's frustrating. Right now we have ugly black cables snaking across the floor to connect us to the router. This will not stand! Not in the long run.
I'm thinking of getting a new PC. I've been toying with the idea anyhow. While I enjoy using linux--most of hte time--it does give me trouble sometimes when I just need to get work done. I can't send edits of my manuscripts back and forth with editors on my PC; OpenOffice doesn't see the notes the editors make in Word. I have to use the laptop (running XP). A Windows box would solve that problem. It would also enable me to connect wirelessly--any new PC I bought would have a wireless card installed.
I don't want to give up my linux machine, though. I like using it. Mostly. But it would make some things easier. If I can get some help making the wireless adapter work, I could stick with this machine for a while longer. It's some years old now, but I only netsurf and write on it. It's not like I use it for gaming anymore, so the fact that it doesn't have bleeding-edge graphics and metric buttloads of memory or a blazing fast CPU doesn't really matter. On the other hand, I use this machine for actual work now--my writing--so wrestling with a stubborn software or hardware issue for a couple of days (or more) at a time isn't as acceptable as it used to be. I'm less willing to throw myself into battle with the software. It's not that I don't have all my files backed up, I do. But being unable to use the computer for some indeterminate time while I try to show the machine who's boss is an issue.
Speaking of writing, I haven't done any since the last post. I need to get back to it. (Long pause.) That's all I have to say on that subject for the moment.
In our last exciting episode, we'd attended Orycon and sold the house all in a weekend. We'd packed away most of our household goods in a rented storage pod, on the assumption that it could be weeks or months before we sold the house. Getting an offer the first day it went on sale--and for more than the asking price--was a very pleasant surprise. On the flip side, the buyers wanted the house as soon as possible, necessitating a quick exit.
We're all moved into the new apartment now. We still have boxes to unpack, and settling in to do, along with buying some new furniture--we sold, or gave away, furniture we no longer needed or wanted during the prep work and sale. But we're completely out of the house. I've been busy these last three weeks continuing to clear out the house--disposing of furniture, tools, and accumulated junk in the basement and garage. When I wasn't doing that, I was going through closets and cupboards, boxing up as much as possible in preparation for the actual move. Lots of trips to U-Haul for boxes of various sizes and types. Making calls to arrange for people to show up to take things. Trying (unsuccessfully) to sell some of it on Craigslist.
This past Tuesday two guys from Community Warehouse showed up at the house to take possession of a large quantity of furniture we donated to them. On Thursday, movers arrived at 9 a.m. (just as I returned from dropping Snippy off at the airport for her long-planned trip to San Francisco) to begin emptying the house. Twoson and I supervised while they loaded the truck, then we led them to the new place and unloaded it all into the apartment, again supervising where to place things. All in all it took a little over four hours, and the movers were friendly and efficient. I'd recommend Smooth Move People to anyone.
They didn't take everything. Not everything was ready to be moved. Twoson and I made a number of trips over the course of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, moving one carload at a time. But by Saturday afternoon, we had the very last of our stuff out of the house and in the apartment. We did this while enduring nasty colds (both of us) all the while. That wasn't much fun. Neither was the record, pouring rain during our move.
One of the advantages of owning your own home is that you can drill holes in the floor to run network cabling from room to room through the basement. Aside from the Xbox and Wii, which have wireless dongles, everything else in our network was physically connected to the router. That's not an option in the new apartment, obviously. So we decided to go wireless. I bought a couple of wireless USB adapters for the three PCs.
One of the adapters works flawlessly with Snippy's PC. The same adapter did not work on Twoson's PC; at first because we gave it the wrong security setting (it could see the wireless networks here but couldn't connect to ours because it didn't have the password). That's when I tried it on Snippy's computer, and having figured out what I'd done wrong, used the correct setting. It worked perfectly. But when I tried to reinstall it on Twoson's computer it stubbornly refused to detect any networks at all. (But moved back to Snippy's computer, it still works perfectly.)
The second device didn't work on Twoson's computer either. And neither, of course, will work on mine. I'm running linux, and getting a wireless adapter to interface with my computer is a task beyond my understanding, at least so far. It's frustrating. Right now we have ugly black cables snaking across the floor to connect us to the router. This will not stand! Not in the long run.
I'm thinking of getting a new PC. I've been toying with the idea anyhow. While I enjoy using linux--most of hte time--it does give me trouble sometimes when I just need to get work done. I can't send edits of my manuscripts back and forth with editors on my PC; OpenOffice doesn't see the notes the editors make in Word. I have to use the laptop (running XP). A Windows box would solve that problem. It would also enable me to connect wirelessly--any new PC I bought would have a wireless card installed.
I don't want to give up my linux machine, though. I like using it. Mostly. But it would make some things easier. If I can get some help making the wireless adapter work, I could stick with this machine for a while longer. It's some years old now, but I only netsurf and write on it. It's not like I use it for gaming anymore, so the fact that it doesn't have bleeding-edge graphics and metric buttloads of memory or a blazing fast CPU doesn't really matter. On the other hand, I use this machine for actual work now--my writing--so wrestling with a stubborn software or hardware issue for a couple of days (or more) at a time isn't as acceptable as it used to be. I'm less willing to throw myself into battle with the software. It's not that I don't have all my files backed up, I do. But being unable to use the computer for some indeterminate time while I try to show the machine who's boss is an issue.
Speaking of writing, I haven't done any since the last post. I need to get back to it. (Long pause.) That's all I have to say on that subject for the moment.