Happy to Be Wired Again

Last Saturday, I attempted to install an old scanner (and by old, I mean almost as old as David). I should have known better, but I did anyway, assuming it would be OK, and if not, no big. Well, XP crashed during install, but the scanner worked OK so I thought all was good.

A *short* time later, XP was complainng about not being connected to the wireless router. To make a long story short, it broke something in XP; drivers, dll's, who knows. But after nearly a day of trying to fix, I called AT&T for help, along with calling/[estering my friend Tim. I even used the pay-for-services route, as I didn't want to rebuild XP. Well, there was too much afoul, and the tech could not help, but he did a decent job trying, so I ndo not begrudge the small fee.

So I rebuilt, and you would think I knew what I was doing. Initially I had trouble with the XP boot disk, as there is a very short window to press a key for setup, and Blindie didn't see it too well. So formatted c:, installed XP, then SPs 2/3. There were some broken items, but I had the original Dell Drivers CD, so putting most of those on was no big deal.

Once done with this, I plugged in the 2Wire wireless adapter, set the Windows Zero thing on, and it seemed to easily connect to the adapter and I had a good signal strength, but I couldn't get anything in Firefox to show up.

Well, back to AT&T free basic support, and I got lucky. I got one of the most patient, knowledgable, and pleasant base-level techies I have ever talked to. Despite me messig something up with a blindie mistake, and having him take me through the process again, in half an hour, I was good to go and connected.

Major lesson learned here: do NOT hit the reset on your router - it resets the PW to factory defaults. Bad idea. In my desperation to connect earlier, I had reset it in hopes that that was the reason it wasn't connectiung. If I want to 'reset' the router, apparently, just unplug for 30 seconds and power back up.

So thanks to the AT&T tech from last night, and Tim for bearing with me. I was surprised by how much it bugged me not to be able to connect from home, so the kids could look stuff up for homework, and personal stuff I do. Ah, life is a smidge better today.........

eBay Joy

It's been awhile for me to sell stuff on eBay, but my geek shelf space was too full, so I recently sold 12 board games there. The auctions themselves went alright, and I always go into eBay with the expectation someone is going to ask a silly question, or two, or many, and something may go wrong along the way, which helps me not to get needlessly worked up over what amounts to be small annoyances.

This time was a bit more challenging though, as some of the boxes were overly large, and I had to hand-wrap 2 to be able to mail. Then I grossly underestimated shipping. Lesson learned #1. Lesson learned #2 - track everything! It's only 75 cents here, and I had a winning bidder's bank retract the PayPal payment, and it was my most expensive sell of the lot (a HeroScape promo figure a gaming buddy helped me get). I indeed got a bit upset, as I was out ~$33, didn't have the item, and he left positive feedback, yet because I could not provide the tracking number, I would be basically screwed if he didn't straighten this out. Well, he did, and was apologetic and all turned out well, but tracking, tracking, and tracking is the way, apparently.

Even with the shipping bath I gave myself, I was able to get the following, and still have monies leftover:
- Spinal Tap OST (Original Soundtrack)
- Logan's Run DVD
- The Hobbot/LotR animated classics on DVD
- Final Fantasy 8 OST
- Kingdom Hearts OST
- a nice blue neon wall clock (simple/large/neat; heavy and pricey to ship though)
- Pandemic expansion
- Race for the Galaxy expansion
- mini-European card sleeves
- American Pie DVD
- Tron 20th anniv DVD

Numeric-wise, I sold 12 items, and turned around and bought 12, so it may seem silly, but the games take up way more space, and I am glad people are enjoying them more than I did. They were good games, but I just wasn't playing them much currently.

Then last week, I put up 20 items: mostly kids movies and PS2 games that we haven't touched in ages, as well as a Magic Pre-Con of Slivers. The last one is the only one going for more than $1, but I didn't expect much. Not sure if it was worth the effort, but that's OK. More PayPal monies to come.

And on another note, looking forward to GenCon later this week. I have no planned purchases, so we'll see how this goes.

I haven't been blogging much lately - been using Status updates on FB to quasi-blog there. I suppose it's good as it keeps my verbosity in check.