« Some velo news | Main | Updatus rodentus »

Geeked out

My ride yesterday was totally fine. My rear was indeed sore and my legs were tired by the end, but it really wasn't that hard, thanks to the flat-by-San Francisco-standards route and the excellent weather. We had a beautiful day of biking.

Today I watched Dave race in a crit, then we came home and got our network dialed. Ahh, what a perfect Sunday.

Dave just got a Slingbox for work-related purposes (really!), but unfortunately, it needs to be hard-wired into both the cable box and an internet connection. So he moved our broadband modem and router into the living room, which disrupted the feng shui in the house in a couple of ways. First of all, our living room is a sacred clutter-free space (compared to the rest of the apartment) and no place for the blinking lights of the modem and router. Secondly, the move obliterated the wireless signal to my Powerbook, which must reside in the office, where it is plugged into various hard drives and other devices.

We have two Airport Expresses, which we use to play music wirelessly in the living room and kitchen via iTunes. They are like mini-routers, so I figured out how to configure them to act as wireless range extenders for our Linksys wifi router. Thus the Slingbox can be plugged right into the ethernet port of an Airport Express -- which is also plugged into the living room speakers, on which I am currently listening to Stereolab, which I am playing from one laptop but which lives on an external hard drive connected to the other laptop. Got that?

I love technology.

So we were able to move the modem/router setup back to the office where it belongs. An added bonus is that with the Airports extending our wireless signal, we now have a solid five-bar signal everywhere in the apartment, even in spots where we used to have only two bars. And the Slingbox works great, so Dave can watch and control our cable signal over the interweb. He has promised me he won't change the channel from work if I'm at home watching Magnum P.I. reruns.

Now if I could just get our Windows machine to print wirelessly to the Mac's printer, I'd be set.

This stuff has gotten me reminiscing about college. When I moved into my dorm freshman year, two-thirds of the crap I schlepped with me was a huge computer, monitor, keyboard and mouse, slow-ass modem, stereo, and giant box of CDs (which grew by orders of magnitude while I was in college, of course). Now all of those things, plus the TV/VCR combo I picked up along the way, can be replaced by a single four-pound computer the size of an anthropology textbook.

Back then, all of this stuff would have blown my mind... high-speed internet at home? wirelessly? A thousand CDs' worth of music stored on a tiny laptop computer? My college friends and I fantasized aloud about this stuff. Often. One friend looked forward to the day he could check his email from bed. Another longed for the day Apple made a laptop that was powerful enough to replace a desktop, but also affordable. (It seemed so unobtainable that we called it the Messiah computer.)

And that was only ten... uh, 14 years ago!

Of course, if I were moving in to that dorm room now, I wouldn't bring a stereo, but I'd have a bike, wetsuit, and five pairs of running shoes. I guess there is always something to fill the space.

April 1, 2007 7:37 PM