Thanksgiving has come and gone, and with it the four-day weekend.
I had the standard dinner — turkey, mashed potatoes, sage dressing (with gravy), corn and roll, with pumpkin pie for desert. I had it again Saturday evening for leftovers. The rest of the day was spent cleaning the back rooms of the house, including the dryer vent, which had not been touched since I moved in.
On Friday I visited Muncie to shop for a shade for my floor lamp. I had no luck, and it looks like I will have to shop the Net for one. But I did find ornaments suitable for my XMas tree, and gift bags for my presents to my sisters and Padre. I also got gifts for my nieces. They are arrayed around the XMas tree at home.
The last day was a surprise. I got out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and wondered why the light outside was so bright and I could not see the yard. I looked out and learned: There was an inch layer of snow outside. I sent the morning shoveling out the deck, around the car and the front sidewalk.
Anonymity plus an audience turns an average person into a dumbass. It also creates really bad law — the kind of law that makes the use of all those so-called Web 2.0 sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube dangerous because it holds their users criminally liable for violations of the sites’ terms of service. That was the result of the ruling in the conviction of some evil woman who was supposed to have driven a teenage girl to suicide. How the decision is ruled on in the next few days will make or break Web 2.0 as a viable medium.
I finally admitted to myself that having a computer downstairs without a network connection is unfeasible. It does not mean I will take the computer upstairs with the other two machines. It means I will have to find some way to connect it to my home network.
Wiring it to the network is out of the question because that would involve moving cable out of the house, along the phone line, then along the side of the house, around the chimney, and into the living room. That is not feasible.
I would like to move all my wiring (network and phone) under the house, like the folks have theirs; but they have a basement, and I do not. I want at least a trench-like crawlspace under my house, like what my sister the editor has, but that is a we-can-dream project that may or may not be doable.
That leaves wireless, something that I have resisted for years due to security issues. But I have found an Ars-recommended programmable wireless router that will let me join the downstairs computer to the home network with a wireless card.