Running interference
I spent far too many hours on a router. Changing settings, reading forums, e-mailing with tech support, calling tech support at the router's maker, calling tech support at the computer's maker, but deciding to go to bed before getting through with the latter. Ten minutes of hold music late at night make you sleepy. I'd never lost to a router before (Cooper 10 or so, only a couple my own; routers 0) and wasn't going to lose this one. In the end, I didn't. I'd forgotten to plug in the network adapter's antenna, something I'd stared at when I first got the new machine last month and had no idea what it was. Unfrozen caveman Cooper.
The answer there, after a week, came by accident, little hungover and looking for slow-moving quiet projects on a weekend morning, deciding to find a way to run cable wires from one room to another that had no direct holes in between them and nothing in the rental agreement that allowed holes. But it turns out sliding glass doors only use part of their tracking and leave a little track underneath. The instructions for the cable on the new computer stumbled across the network adapter ones, and two problems were solved.
The car window's another story. Stuck a fifth of the way down in the Friday rain was a little worse than the slow moving all week. A day or so of trying got it all the way up. I'm going to perfect the garage scan drive-by, I think. Glide to just in front of the scanners, open the door and reach. Not sure what's up with the window. Could be the motor, but I have this sneaking feeling it's not. There's some film on the window, possibly the motor breaking down, but maybe salt or sand or something from the roads as the weather goes back and forth and back and forth. We'll find out soon. Honda wants us in for a new timing belt. I've put that off long enough. But I'm good at putting things off. Except for work, which always has to get done right now.
Stupid Quarterlife. It's an awful show, so the Bravo marathon today has taught us all, a show that makes you wonder how we even get outselves to work at all, operating mechanical monsters and municipal transit. But there's a sense of realism in the exposure, an artificial counterforce to the wealth of the artificial that hide us. Listing to the expanded Joshua Tree release now … the outtakes are always darker and more disorienting, if you're any good.
My hair's probably the longest it's been in years, and I'd take a picture for you on my new cell, but I'm still straddling the line. For those of you keeping score at home, that's old computer August 1998-February 2008 and old cell August 2003-March 2008. The new cell had its own problems. A long round of tech support on a mid-week evening to get it activated had no luck. Until the call ended and I shut off the old phone. The new one started up right away.
