Wow. For sometime I've been working almost exclusively from my windows laptop. The unintended consequence being that I haven't been posting here. After being in Windows land for so long, I can say without hestition: I've missed my Mac. Now, I've discovered some nice utilities, tools, and applications for Windows, but for my day in and day out activities, the Macintosh is far better - IMHO. I've especially had withdrawl from the one-click dictionary, spotlight, the unix terminal, Mail.app, and NetNewsWire Lite - to name a few.
Anyway, I have some older stuff to post, rather than doing it retroactively, I'll just post it like it was new.
New House
Maryna and I purchased a house. It is very nice. I had to put a week into painting and moving, but now everything is beautifully in order. If you know me, you'll have to come see it.
Now, the house's cable modem access point is in Maryna's office and my office is on the complete opposite end of the house. I tried each and every wireless channel but non of them proved to reach my office with more than a "very weak" signal. Plus, the airspace is a might bit more crowded in this neighborhood causing me to get bumped from the net at least once every three hours ;( I went looking for something more reliable. We have plaster-of-parris walls so dragging networking cable through the ceiling was out because you can't make a wall drop like you can with drywall. I decided to check out the Homeplug 1.0 standard. I purchased two Netgear Power-over-Ethernet bridges and hooked them up. The throughput is comparable with 802.11b, and the reliability is great. I haven't been bumped off the net since. The latency seems to be a little better than the wireless networking equipment that I had, but the Homeplug is more susceptible to network jitter. I get unexpected spikes in latency, whereas the wireless equipment was more or less constant. The other thing I worry about is a cord running from my power outlet to my PC. No it won't work through a surge protector.
