Wot? Me a whistle blower?

We had a small debate at work yesterday about folks who come in sick despite the general health warning to stay at home if suffering "flu-like symptoms".

H1N1 flu having been declared a national emergency in the US, the the guidance - at least the guidance from CDC - was recently updated to recommend staying away for 7 days or until at least 24 hours after fever has subsided. Here in Canada we do not have a "national emergency" declared as such, and the Public Health Agency of Canada says:

Contagiousness

More research is being done on how long a person can be infectious (be able to spread the virus to others), but it is believed that this period is for one day before the onset of symptoms and continues for approximately seven days after symptoms have started.The time it takes between being infected and experiencing symptoms is between two and seven days.

Treatment

If you get flu-like symptoms and are otherwise healthy, you should stay home to recover. If your symptoms worsen or you experience difficulty breathing or serious shortness of breath, it is important to seek medical attention.

This is all very well (no pun intended), but where I work most people have already used up their quota of "Personal Days" for the year. This is paid time off you can take at short notice for being sick, going to see the doctor or dentist, going to a funerals, etc. Otherwise we work to a schedule set three weeks in advance.

Also, many of my co-workers depend entirely on their call center income (between $10 and $15 an hour) and simply can't afford to take time off. Added to which absences count against your "scorecard", which among other things may determine which hours you get scheduled. You get 1/4 of a point against you for being more than 4 minutes late, 1 point if you take a whole day off (2 points if you don't call in), and if you accumulate 12 points your job is on the line. Now, do I need to mention the bus service? We operate 7/24, and this is not Stockholm.

No doubt those worthy HR folks are wondering what they should do. Well, how about not awarding points for absence if you can get a doctor's note during the flu season? Otherwise people are actually under pressure to show up anyway. Who's gonna send them home?

Wot? Me a whistle-blower? Who knew?

Alas! I am my mother's son.

Duh? **3

Well, today - in a fit of hyper-cleanliness - I managed to vacuum up my 4GB SanDisk thumb drive, and now I am going to have to disassemble my old Hoover "K" series, and delve into the contents of the bag in order to retrieve it. I'm sure it will still work tho'.

Another "Duh?": on my Mac Mini OSX 10.4.11 /var/log/daily.out shows /etc/daily running TWICE daily. It seems that in /etc/periodic/daily there is a file 500.daily.applesaved as well as just 500.daily . Who knew? Shouldn't Apple's Software Update fix that for me? (I already know the answer: this was DONE by the OSX 10.4.11 update!).

Meanwhile, "Mah cawull senner jeobyeh" seems like it's finally about to fold. They closed the cafeteria a week ago, so now you have to "brown-bag" it. This saves me a bundle and I am losing weight fast. I volunteered for the "Early Termination Fee", but it turns out that is something else.

Right now we are STILL working on my "Average Handle Time". Our department does what is allegedly paid support for folks who lease wireless equipment from us. As in: "I'm very sorry, but having your OWN router disqualifies you." Despite being "Tier 2" (which means that customers can't call us directly), we are supposed to achieve an average of 825 seconds for each call. Yeah, right!

"Hi my name is Gwen: I am 64 years old and partly deaf and NONE of my FOUR wireless PC's can connect. No I don't know my WEP key or my wireless network name. What version of Windows am I running ? I don't know. What do I do to bring up the list of available wireless networks? Oh, I just click on Internet Explorer. Oh yes, we did have a power outage last night."

Need I say more?

Rosh Hashana

I am from East Scottish coal mining stock and my family background is Presbyterian, but it did not include much in the way of traditional religious observance. Most of my uncles were card-carrying Communists, strictly about christenings, weddings, and funerals. The word "God" was mentioned quite a lot, but rarely in a prayerful context. Our family bible was most often used as a missile. Alas!

So it was with mixed feelings that just now at noon I heard three long sounds, and realized it was one of my neighbours sounding a shofar. It's good to know there are still folks out there who follow their traditions.

I wish everybody "Shana Tova Umetukah" -- "A Good and Sweet Year."

Com-freakin-tastic

So this lady calls me up at work. She spoke to FOUR previous agents. We soon figured out that her computer wasn't plugged in to her modem. We plugged it in, I reset the modem, and she rebooted her PC. Then she was back online.

FOUR previous agents?

Am I good, or what?

Death Panel for Mama

It was late October, 2004. The phone rang about 15:00. I had the day off from my call center job. I was sitting in my skivvies at my computer, drinking beer and reading the news.

Ma had been in care since the Spring of 1998. She'd been a teacher all her life, and her monthly income was about 850 pounds (UKL). She had 16,000 pounds net worth including whatever was left of my father's savings. She enjoyed robust good health 1981-1998, but then she got a UTI, the drugs for which upset her stomach, and she started living on just tea and biscuits.

Getting weak, she started to fall down a lot, and every time she'd fetch up in the hospital she'd go completely nuts. And I do mean psychotic. Later, a social worker told me she'd been self-medicating with uppers and downers including Valium. She had been getting prescriptions from four different doctors. It did not seem that surprising to me that whenever she was cut off she'd go crazy. They call that "dementia".

When Ma went into managed care in 1998 her income went up by 60% due to all the subsidies she was now eligible to receive. Hertfordshire Social Services didn't touch her savings, but if she had owned a house she would have lost it.

Fast forward to 2004. The doctor came on the line from the hospital in Hemel Hempstead.

"If your mother goes into cardiac arrest, what should we do?"

"Well, she's been a regular customer of yours for the last six years and she's always telling people that she doesn't want to live any longer. I think we should just let her go".

That was the end of that.

In Memoriam: Bob Collens

Bob Collens (Robert John Collens, 12/31/1947-5/24/2009) was a man I got to know and spend some time with in 2007. He introduced himself to me one day and before long we were talking about common interests and experiences we had. Bob only had partial use of a car at the time and used to spend a lot of time alone. We used to go out driving to various parks in the Winnipeg area, eat out, and go to movies and stuff. Along the way, we shared each other's life stories, quite a few laughs, and we talked about an astonishingly wide range of subjects including: cars, computers, fear, our families, hydrogen cars, politics, recovery, religion, terror, therapy, the women in our lives, and much else. Bob was a gentle friend and support.

After a while all friendships change and I didn't see Bob at all in the last year or so. It was with much sadness I heard he had passed away after a short illness. Due to my own failure to keep in touch, I never got to say goodbye.

My best memories of Bob are:

The way he stuck his hand out to greet me the first time he introduced himself. I would never have done that myself.

Watching the amazed look on his face as he fed the chickadees at Bird's Hill Park on a winter's afternoon. He got five landings on his hand, and I got one.

Car shopping with Bob: we looked at everything on four wheels.

Bob eating a chocolate eclair from DeLuca's.

Bob holding my vacuum cleaner and responding to my calls for "Suction!" when I was cleaning my Mac Mini to upgrade the memory.

Bob reacting to various things, including chickadees, chocolate eclairs, ice cream, and driving my car.

Bob being thoughtful and pensive.

Rest in peace, Bob.

---

You can see some pictures of Bob on this slideshow.

I never said she stole my money

Re. This article in the NY Times

'For example, the sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed.'

Are you freakin' kiddin' me?

Get over it: life is already WAY too complicated.

For a start, it means: “I never said she stole my money”

Or, you can emphasise as follows:

I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money
I never said she stole my money

But are these guys messed up, or what?

For example, what about: I never said she stole my money? They can't count: we're up to nine variations already.

And consider the au contraire case: "My assistant always refused to mention in her e-mails that I had given him the Lamborghini."

You get the idea. What really is "emphasis"?

It seems that one man's "emphasis" is another man's denial.

Remember that when you are next in court.

In the country of the blind

You are in the call center. You are on your own. Just you, a headset, a phone, a computer, and the clock.

The phone rings.

"Thuh Inner-nayt is de-uh-own"

"No it isn't. Just restart your modem and your router. See?"

The phone rings again.

"I forgot my WEB KEY".

"Let me show you how to sign into your router to get your key."

"Why do we have to go through all this? Why can't you just tell me my WEB KEY"

"Because it's only stored on your router".

"What's a router?"

Education starts with knowing that you don't know the answer to something, then asking a question, then listening to what you get back, and so on.

It helps if you have attention span and you can read and are able to follow up on the answers that you receive.

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

Why do we have to restart routers?

1) Most retail or ISP "home networking" routers are built to a low, low price, and you only get what you pay for.

2) The router OS usually does not include (e.g.) a cron job to reboot regularly to force automatic cleanup of queues, etc. Some customers would like this, but it might be considered disruptive, so it's avoided.

3) Even if the manufacturer's power supply is robust, they are often mismatched, whether by ISP techs or home owners, and this causes all sorts of problems including overheating and frequent router resets.

4) [Name of ISP withheld] guidance is NOT to plug an integral modem/router into a power bar or surge protector if possible, since this is supposed to help avoid the problem of the router resetting itself to factory defaults due to a "power surge" (supposedly caused by: lightning, "storm surge", brown-out, or power cut). This mainly affects wireless clients, since customization (SSID, WEP or WPA) gets lost, and you end up with a house full of "wireless orphans".

Rightly or wrongly, many High Speed Internet customers seem to be under the impression that their service is supposed to be up and available ALL the time. Looking at their monthly tariffs (often $50 per month or higher) this is not unreasonable, whereas - in practice - most residential Internet equipment (modems and routers) is subject to various additional upstream issues including line breaks, cable head end restarts, upstream router restarts, name server switching (?), and all sorts of other issues I don't even know about. In this environment, having to restart FIRST the modem, and THEN the router cleans up more than 50% of all "can't connect" scenarios, and - these days - you often do NOT have to restart the computers as well.

This simple information is not known by the majority of consumers, especially those whose own sense of "entitlement" gives them the mindset to get on the phone and be sarcastic (or worse) at the first sign of any disruption to their (residential) service, "because I work from home", etc. Arguably, MOST router restarts are requested by ISP tech support folks while trying to do basic cleanup as a prelude to other troubleshooting.

I have some sympathy for folks who happen to live "in a bad spot" in terms of their chosen Internet provider's infrastructure. They just seem to go apoplectic after a while if problems continue.

In conclusion, consumers deserve better, and the industry (both ISPs and router manufacturers) should be providing it.

See http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=612415&cid=24170151
Why do we have to restart routers? by cooker47 (1096599) on Sunday July 13, @02:00AM (#24170151)

Weirder and weirder

Ya, so I got ten days of vacazione from "mah cawull senner jeyohb". I went on a 3-day spree, and then realized that altho' the economy is not my fault, my own personal economy is down to me. Uh-oh! I hate having to be responsible.

Mac Mini - replace hard drive / unable to read DVDs

On my late 2005 Mac Mini G4 1.5Ghz I just replaced my original 80GB Seagate drive after Disk Utility failed multiple times to repair "Invalid node structure".

After installing a new 160 GB Seagate ST9160281A (5 years warranty, $112 Canadian), and booting from my Tiger Install disk, I found that Disk Utility would also not see the new drive. I took everything apart again (I love that cracking sound when you open the case) and found that the corner of one of those pieces of yellow tape had fallen off the Airport cable and a corner of it was caught in the ATA slot on the motherboard where the riser fits.

So, I carefully removed the tape and swabbed the riser contacts with a Q-Tip moistened in alcohol mouthwash. After drying, I put it all back together again and this time it worked.

In reassembly, I also noticed that there was still a bit of wiggle room, a little gap where the drive connector plugs into the riser, so I applied a judicious bit of extra finger pressure to the back of the riser in order to make sure it was seated properly and the gap minimized.

Also about reassembly, after reinstalling the Mac Mini's case, DVDs would not eject. The reason for this was that I had an alignment problem after incorrectly mounting the Airport device on the front right hand corner of the DVD drive.

I referred to http://www.smashsworld.com/2005/01/mac-mini-complete-technical.php and the excellent document http://str.smashsworld.com/?mac_mini.pdf. This clearly showed me that the Airport card is supposed to be mounted on the notched plastic clip at the BACK right-hand corner of the case.

I had not been able to mount DVDs at all before starting the work, so to start with I could not even boot up the install disk to run Disk Utility, but that was resolved easily enough after removing the case. After cleaning the Mac Mini inside with lots of canned air and then vacuuming, I carefully squirted a few extra shots of canned air through the mouth of the DVD drive, and then it was working again.

Mah cawull senner jeeyobh

Apparently "Mah cawull senner jeeyobh" may be in danger of disappearing due to the high Canadian dollar.

Well, that and some capitalists who want to maintain a given cashflow.

Despite recent financial upsets, the still-rising price of oil, and now - who woulda thunk it? - food shortages, it seems as if some folks still think they are just naturally entitled to have a whole lot of stuff most people will never be able to afford.

Could this be a portent that those ugly old "argyments for So-shee-liz-um" are about to come back?

Hey, maybe they'll improve the school system so much it'll put me out of a job?

What a scary thought! I might have to scrimp and save, or even ... FIND A REAL JOB!

HEEEEEEEEELP!!!

Fings Like Wot I Believe, Eh?

Fings like wot I believe, eh? Not many in number, but stuff I try to live by. In no particular order:

You are what you eat, so be careful where you eat and always wash your hands.
The glass is always half full and half empty at the same time.
"What goes around comes around."
Life is tough and then you die, but the universe goes on forever.
"It's better to sleep on things beforehand than to lie awake about them afterwards."
You can't take it with you, and it doesn't matter anyway.
"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."

Um, that's all I can think of today.

"Most seamless" and "very unique"

I was reading this article about Macs and anti-virus when this VMWare ad popped up:

VMware Fusion. The most seamless way to run Windows on your Mac. Backed by nearly a decade of proven virtualization technology. Try VMware Fusion today for free, or order online for only $79.
Visit: http://www.tidbits.com/about/support/vmware-fusion.html.

Well, duh? Sorry, Mr.VMWare Copywriter, either something is seamless or it's not. Which means for something to be "most seamless" is meaningless. Which means your advertisement is counter-productive. So there. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Even better, check this out.

This is just like all those vapid people who talk about other vapid people as being "very unique". Sorry, vapid people everywhere, either a person or a thing is unique ("the only one of its kind") or it isn't. I am unique, and so are you, but you are also vapid and misusing the English language. See here.

People like that should be made to write out one hundred times "I am unique and I will never be 'very unique' and neither will any other person or thing that is the only one of its kind, and as well as that nothing can be 'most seamless' it can only be 'seamless' or 'not seamless'. Maybe one day I will learn this and not give the impression that I am a vapid person who does not know the English language".

I have spoken.

Ice Gog / Bureaucratic Lunacy / Disassembling Flash on OSX

Ya, so recently Environment Canada changed the appearance of their weather pages. They used to look like this:



As a side note, please be aware of the new meterological phenomenon "Ice gog", which occurs when angry ice demons six miles high rise from beneath the frozen waters of Lake Winnipeg.




But I digress; EC weather pages now look like this:



As you can see the icons used for the moon are especially pretty. The only problem is that they never change. For example, tonight 6th March 2008, the web site shows the moon waxing about the first quarter, but in fact there is no moon.

I sent a note to EC about this a few weeks back and got a short reply saying their web site was not intended to show this information, and suggesting I should go look at stardate.org which is run by McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas at Austin.

Now, I know they have mariners in Texas 'cos I remember that old song about Galveston. But here in Canada, we are surrounded by ocean on three sides, as well as which the name of the country itself means "The Land of A Thousand Lakes", and all Canadian males are addicted to fishing from an early age. Need I say more? But to find out the phase of the moon I have to go look at a web site in Austin?

Anyway, I did so and I found out lots about the moon and it's phases and different calendars and stuff. Also, to grab some actual pictures of the moon phases I decided to find out how to extract them from a Flash file. This was a crazy, mad, lunatic adventure all of itself. Here are the notes I made for your delectation and delight.

Snowstorm in Winnipeg

Winter is nearly over but we are still in the deep freeze. I took this real short video clip off of my balcony on Saturday, six floors up looking West over the Assiniboine River.

Configuring a Netgear WRG614 router with OSX

Hey, a blog craves content, and nobody ever seems to read my blog except me, so "WTF". This entry is based on my post at http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=5084100#post5084100 .

I had a caller today who was trying to set up a NetGear WRG614 router for use with his new ISP, a well-known cable company.

We power-cycled his modem and the router, and then signed in to the WRG614 at 192.168.0.1 using default username and password admin/password.

We went through router setup, selected the automatic/use DHCP option with no login (required for his ISP's "Broadband connection that is always on").

Along the way the router asked a question about MAC address and we went with the default setting ("No", I think).

Thereafter he eventually got a valid WAN IP address, but we could not launch a regular browser session and get to the WWW. We kept getting sent back to the router setup dialog. This happened on two machines. He also kept getting a message during router setup, something like "your computer is now being managed by the address 192.168.0.2".

Despite my advice my caller kept running router setup on both Macs and he kept getting the same results, so eventually I let him go after giving him Netgear's phone number (1-888-NETGEAR). However, after the call was ended it struck me that maybe the router setup was trying to do a "MAC address clone" thing when the mysterious "MAC address .. Default" option was selected in the setup dialog. This would explain why he kept getting the "your computer is now being managed ..." message for the same LAN IP address on each of the two different Macs.

We didn't try doing the router configuration with the WAN port on the router NOT plugged in to the modem, as was suggested by "aeronaut" in the thread way back on 2006-06-03.

I'll try to give the guy a call back tomorrow to see if he was able to resolve the issue.

Wireless Zero Configuration Or Not?

Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) is a Windows XP service that you can use to manage wireless network connections. It's pretty easy to use, but a lot of laptop PCs and OEM wireless network adapters still come with other software provided by their manufacturers. So which should you use?

Well, prior to Windows XP there was no choice and you HAD to use the card manufacturer's software. Now you can often find yourself using "WZC" with XP automatically, whereas sometimes an XP laptop with builtin wireless may be set up to use wireless configuration software from Broadcom, Atheros or Intel (whoever manufactured the wireless chip), a lot of Dell laptops come set up to use Dell's own Wireless LAN card Utility, and Lenovo or IBM ThinkPads may use IBM Access Connections, arguably the Roll-Royce of connection solutions for the professional road warrior. After market, if you install an add-on wireless network adapter from Belkin, Netgear, Linksys, or SMC you will usually end up with the card manufacturer's software installed by default. In every case, the software does a similar job, but the details differ.

There is always a means provided to scan for a list of available wireless networks and to specify connection parameters. Usually all need to know is your network name and your WPA passphrase or your WEP key. Third party wireless configuration software often includes additional controls to turn builtin wireless on or off, perhaps to select or deselect WZC, screens for creating, editing, and saving connection profiles (something WZC does automatically), and even a screens to manage different sets of networking and security profiles for use in various locations such as home, office, school, and so on.

Which software you should use for Windows XP wireless configuration is almost a religious issue for some technical support folks, and this can be very confusing for typical users who sometimes may be caught in the middle. Some techies will always tell you to use WZC because it's easy for them to have everyone use the same solution. This approach is great for both of you if it works, but often it does not and that depends on your equipment. One problem you can run into is that the tech support agent gets you connected one time using WZC, but after a reboot the connection doesn't work anymore. Profiles have to be saved and changes have to stay in place which ever approach you use. Other tech support folks can take a more conservative approach and they may recommend that you use whatever software came with your wireless equipment and not change it. You are stuck in the middle. What should you do?

Well, for a start don't let some pimply-faced kid from your ISP's support department tell you how to configure your expensive computer over the phone. After five minutes he will be gone, leaving you with the results of your decision. How much did you spend on your wireless computer anyway, and how badly do you want it to work for you? The best thing you can do for yourself is spend a few minutes learning how your own particular computer is set up and how to use the wireless connection software provided by the manufacturer. If possible you should get the sales agent to show you this in the store, and make him spend time with you to answer any questions you may have. How do you turn the wireless on? How do you make a connection? You should make a decision not to change the way your computer is set up and to be prepared to stick with it. The worst thing that can happen is that your ISP technical support folks ask you to call your computer manufacturer for support.

It helps a great deal to read about wireless networking on the World Wide Web. Do not expect that your wireless connection is always going to work flawlessly. Do expect that it will stop working for you at an inconvenient time. Be prepared to connect through a wire if your wireless connection stops working for whatever reason. Buy an Ethernet patch cord and carry it with your laptop computer at all times. Get one at least twelve feet long for use in most situations. Do not rely on your ISP's technical support folks to keep your computer running for you. Do read as much as you can of the support information your computer manufacturer has made available with your computer and also at their web site.

As for other operating systems, remember that Windows XP came out in 2001. All of the above is really yesterday's news. With both Windows Vista and Mac OSX you have no choice but to use the wireless configuration tools provided by the computer manufacturer. Does this sound familiar? The different flavours of Linux still have some catching up to do, which is another reason to use the software provided by the computer manufacturer, whether it be OLPC, Dell, HP, or whoever.

May all your connections be secure, and your signal strength excellent!

Eeek! Aaargh! Where's the AdSense in that? (Occupation: Yes)

Eeek! Aaargh! Overcome with a sudden fit of I-don't-know-what I recently responded to Blogger's invitation and now I have advertising on this page. Look! There it is! A real advertisment! Why, in theory I could even get paid real money for this! Or at least real pennies!

But hardly anybody ever seems to visit my blog, which - as I wrote recently - seems to be a pointless exercise other than as a means to enable me to know what it means to "have a blog", frustrated novelist, geek, and nerdly philosopher that I am. There must be one of those "Grasshopper stories" in there. Like having some very fit but very old Chinese geezer saying to you: "To know what blog is, first you must begin, O Grasshopper! Then you will learn the secret!"

Actually, I did notice that I get quite a few hits for my "Man of Letters" image here, which file is served from my Apache2 web server at home. God bless all the folks at DynDNS.org. (By the way, the photograph was taken by a lady formerly of my acquaintance while I was sitting in the cafeteria at the National Gallery in Ottawa, reading the Comics page from The Globe and Mail on a Saturday in 1998. Not that you really wanted to know that.)

I am an avid reader of my web server logs. They show me that folks do searches here at www.blogger.com for other bloggers in Manitoba, or where the profile includes "Occupation: Yes", and so on. Meanwhile, out on The Great Wide Internet, other folks searching for quotations visit my collection of Dicta, or they look for instructions on how to daisy chain two routers together, or configure their wireless, and stuff.

It turns out that once you have signed up for AdSense you can put ads on any web site you want to as long you meet Google's content guidelines. I went a little crazy myself - well, crazier than usual - and pasted ads on various pages in the HintsAndTips and HowTo sections of my web site.

So far I didn't actually bother to complete the tax and payment information for my AdSense account, but - given my perpetual state of anxiety - I'm already wondering if I might get busted by "The Google Content Guidelines Police" for putting ads on pages showing Airport or Windows Device Manager configuration screens. I should hope not, but who can tell.

When all's said and done, I'm not sure that having this advertising is really "A Good Thing". It does rather bring down the tone of my web site and I've noticed that at least some visitors seems to stop dead at the first page that shows an ad. Now where's the AdSense in that?

I shall report to you what unfolds if I am allowed to post again from prison.

Help! Help! I can't see any wireless networks! (My laptop has builtin wireless).

Probable cause No.1

The built-in wireless switch on your laptop is turned off. Look very carefully all over the computer for a physical switch or an alternate Function key setting marked "wireless" or "WLAN" or with a little icon that looks like a radio tower or a lollipop radiating waves or a flame or light bulb on top of a triangle. How come there's no international standard for these icons anyway?

To get alternate Function key settings you have to hit the Function or "Fn" key plus the F key. These settings usually work like a toggle: you hit the switch once to turn the wireless on, hit again to turn it off. On a some computers it may have three states: "On" "Off" and "Power savings mode". If you can't find such a switch, try looking for an icon in the lower right hand corner of the screen that when you right-mouse click on it gives you an option to enable or disable your radio.

Usually the built-in wireless network adapter on a laptop computer is associated with a light that comes on when the adapter is powered on. The built-in wireless adapter can get turned off by accident, or by computer Power Management trying to save battery time. Again, sometimes there may be three states, for example "Light is off", "Light is orange", and "Light is blue", corresponding to "On" "Off" and "Power savings mode" settings as above.

You can also try turning off your computer and then turning it back on after 10 seconds. This causes the computer to run through it's Power-On Self Test (POST) procedures, which reinitializes all the hardware and software from the Basic Input Output System (BIOS) on up.

Probable cause No.2

There really aren't any wireless networks broadcasting in range OR the signal is being blocked. First, try power-cycling your modem AND your wireless router AND your computer in that order, each about a minute apart. Usually the wireless router is the weakest link in the chain and very often it just needs a restart.

Otherwise, you may be in a big "wireless shadow area" or inside some sort of a Faraday cage that is blocking wireless signals. Try moving to another area. For example, if you are in a basement try climbing upstairs. If you are in a corner room, try moving to a different one. If you are in a bathroom, try outside the bathroom.

If you are inside a bank vault or some other kind of a metal box such as a freezer, an elevator, a car, truck or locomotive, or a multi-storey car park or any other kind of steel frame construction, try outside. If you are in a swimming pool or a large fish tank, try outside. If you are still indoors, try outside. If you are on a hiking trail in the wilderness, return to the nearest town and retry.

Probable cause No.3

Your wireless network adapter is powered on but it is still not working properly. Try uninstalling the device driver or the device, then turn the computer off and then back on, and try re-installing the device. If necessary, power-cycle the computer once more.

Improbable causes

Somebody just let off a nuclear bomb and all consumer electronics have been totally fried by the radiation.
Sun spots.
You have fallen into a black hole.

Strange Dream #2 - IT department rock stars

I got home from work this aft. and the guy in the apartment next door had his loud friends over again, which always seems to involve lots of loud talk and whooping and coughing while watching some dreadful macho game on TV. I get the impression some drinking might be going on, but I can't imagine why everybody should be coughing so much, or can I? O such dreadful thoughts! Excuse me while I bang my head against the wall in penance.

Anyhoo, after a shift at "mah cawull senner jeyobe" I like to inspect my eyelids for holes. I just plug in my super new Bose Active Earplugs - well, not really - and then I deep-breathe my way off to Dreamland for a few hours. These last couple of days it's minus 40 Centigrade outside what with a high wind from the North and I don't even bother to take off my street clothes. Might as well be comfy in bed, I always say.

Tonight I dreamed I was back in my old corporate suit again and I was meeting with folks from several accounts including my next door neighbour, oddly enough, and we were talking about doing a big project to analyze their web logs in some super-dooper new way that would actually turn their IT departments into profit centers and get them all introduced to new and powerful friends so their careers could all just really take off, along with getting lots of lucrative stock options and stuff - hey, it was just a dream, right? Anyway, I had started to get all evangelical about these prospects when my next door neighbour hands me a note and asks me to go talk to his barmaid downstairs and fetch more beer, a request which I respectfully decline as we are nearing the end of the meeting and I want to be there for the finish when I have yet to deliver my outstanding deal-clinching closing speech.

I woke up shortly after this with the feeling that somewhere along the way I have at last learned not to do trivial things for other people when Great Things Are At Stake, as well as to now be able to talk such amazing blarney as would - at least temporarily - well, charm a motley bunch of low level IT department types into thinking they could get stock options and become sort of IT rock stars in this life. Who knew?

Well, it was a nice dream while it lasted, and I sure can dream that I talk such a good game!