Not much to go on from that weekend.  That marked the third weekend in my recent spate of oncalls, so I hunkered down in the dark and waited for the inevitable pages.  And they came, so I wasn’t disappointed.  Most of my time was spent on various dorky tasks about the house, so about all I can do is re-tell my computer-related exploits.  It’s a pretty safe bet most of you couldn’t care less about those, so if you want to just quit reading now and go back to sleep, that’s OK.

Don’t believe me?  Well, here goes.  And who knows, maybe somebody will find some interesting tidbit in here.  (Doubtful.)  Friday evening I stayed up way-too-late working on my wireless network.  I bought a used wireless router from a guy at work last week, with the original plan of just having a spare in case I messed mine up.  (Again.)  But, unable to stand the thought of having something sitting in the closet gathering dust, I instead embarked on an exciting mission to implement WDS between my two routers.  The first struggle in this project was to pick an alternate firmware for the routers, one that would support the WDS feature as well as my rather unique firewall setup.  After a perilous and ultimately unsuccessful struggle with Tomato and HyperWRT, I finally found network nirvana with DD-WRT.  When I finally called it a night, I had achieved my goal of having an “excellent” wireless signal anywhere in the house, and most likely half-way up the block.  On the downside our wireless doorbell and light switches no longer work, and there is a slight tingling sensation from all the waves in the air, but you gotta have priorities I suppose.

Saturday, still flushed with the excitement of the evening before, I started on a project to install Linux on our laptop.  This was my first attempt at using a machine solely with a Linux O/S, no dual-boot or virtual machine crap.  I decided on the relatively user-friendly Ubuntu distribution, brewed a pot of coffee, and went to work.  Ultimately this was a relatively easy undertaking;  With the exception of having to install a new wireless card I would honestly say it’s an easier process than installing Windows.  So far I’m quite pleased with the results;  It’s fast, easy, and most importantly comes pre-installed with a fancy Sudoku game.  What more could you ask for?  After that, Donette’s parents came over and dropped off their laptop, which had fallen into an unfortunate condition not unlike the one ours was in.  I doubt they would have liked the Linux look though, so I went about installing good ol’ Windows back on theirs.  First though, I wanted to try and salvage some of their data, so I hopped on the scooter and took off for the geek-mecca of the west, Microcenter.  I searched out the skinniest sales guy, with the thickest glasses, told him what I was trying to do, and he recommended a 2.5″ drive case.  The price was right, so I picked it up and scootered back home.  It got the job done, but it turned out to be pretty much a piece of crap.  The directions were almost as bad as the build quality too.  These were the instructions:

Q1:  I could see the icon at the right down comer on the screen, but I still couldn’t find my external HDD.
A1:  Please make sure your HDD has been installed correctly.

Q2:  Why I couldn’t find my enclosure at all?
A2:  This situation somethings happens to some notebook models.  This problem mostly couldn’t solve the problem, please buy a AC power adaptor to offer sufficient power for enclosure.

Wow.  Those aren’t typo’s either, that’s actually what it said.  “This problem mostly couldn’t solve the problem”??!!  Long as it worked, I guess.

Sunday, since I was sorta tethered to my laptop with the whole work thing, the Martins came over to do a little barbecuing.  We decided to practice a few chicken recipes, since our team poultry-guy has forsaken us.  I went with a simple marinade and dry-rub method, while Martin opted for a much more elaborate basting scheme.  At the end of the day, everyone agreed the basted bird was to be our “official” entry at Kearney next weekend.  The only downside was his somewhat aggressive basting technique, but I won’t complain about it.  Somehow, in addition to a liberal application on the chicken, he also basted my patio furniture, the smoker, the deck, the sliding glass door, and one of the dogs.  I’m not complaining though.  The chicken was good.