Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Polar Vortex, Polish Learning and WiFi troubleshooting

Learning the Language of my Ancestors:  So I wimped out today and decided to WFH.  On the one hand I feel guilty that I didn't suck it up and go into the office.  On the other hand, I do have the option to Work From Home and it just doesn't make a lot of sense for me to drive out to OBT in this cold, especially since I only have two meetings that are conf call only (no conference room was reserved).  Originally I was going to use the treadmill at the Office Gym after work to burn some calories and wait out traffic.  Since that isn't going to happen and since it is too cold to run outside if you don't have to, I'm going to use the treadmill in our basement for the first time.  Nightingale uses it quite often but I generally still run outside.

Whenever I work from home, I like to get something accomplished between conference calls.  At the minimum, I strive to go through an hour of Rosetta Stone.  I was off to a good start this month/year, have been side tracked last week because of the training course, and hope to get back on track.  IF I can make it through Lesson 1-3 twice, I will evaluate what I have learned.  If I feel that I have made any sort of forward progress in learning the language of my  ancestors.

Two problems, two fixes implemented:  With all the WiFi repeaters I have going in this house, it doesn't surprise me that I've had a couple of minor issues that are likely related.  issue #1 is that at least once a day, I lose connectivity between my iPad and the internet.  The solution seems to be restarting the WiFi repeater in the kitchen (via unplug/re-plug).  The other problem, which is perhaps indicative of the first, is that my work laptop detects an IP address conflict when I connect it to our home network.

With some Googling I found two separate solutions.  The first suggested that I hard-code the mac addresses of my WiFi repeaters into the modem bridging section.  There isn't a lot of information on this -- at least not during my 5 minute attempt -- but I did figure out and add the MAC addresses (which is a redundant term BTW) of the X and the Apple Airport Express.  While doing this it occurred to me that the AX doesn't seem to broadcast.  I checked the Apple community boards and sure enough, AX don't play nicely in non-Apple ecosystems.  It seems if you want to use them in a typical non-Apple network (for instance NetGear Router, Zoom Modem) you have to have a hard-wired connection.

And of course the only computer I had the AX software on is my netbook which has a very small screen.  This is important because in the configuration menu the Update button appears on the bottom of the form which falls below the menu bar.  Conventional methods of getting to this button didn't work because this particular netbook is running Windows 7 Home Edition which doesn't allow much flexibility for display manipulation.  Luckily I have a second monitor that I was able to connect and by outputting only to that monitor was I able to access the button.  Note to self: install the AX software on the new Win8 desktop, because nothing could possibly go wrong there right.

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