For the last week and a half, my family has not had Internet access at home. It’s my fault.

I’m the family network and pc support technician. When our wireless Internet access went down while I was in Anchorage, it stayed down until I got home. And then it stayed down several days longer while I worked on it.

It’s frustrating to shift over from a full day’s work – often on technical problems – to an evening of fighting technical problems at home. And I’m not very good at technical troubleshooting to begin with, I get too cranky and snappy.

Anyway, when I returned home from Anchorage a week ago, we had no Internet access at all, even direct wired into our cable modem. I called Comcast – whose new call center phone system sucks! – and they helpfully told me that my cable modem was set to standby, blocking access. The button probably got pushed while the family was trying to reset the cable modem in my absence (the primary suggestion I gave them).

At that point, I was able to connect directly from my computer to the Internet. Step 1! Yeah! But I was not able to connect my wireless router to the Internet. I set that up, but the router couldn’t talk to the Internet at all.

I replaced my router. I didn’t want to drive all the way to Silverdale in construction traffic, and Walmart’s options were a Linksys WR54G, which has known issues connecting to Macs, and a Belkin, which is probably nice enough technology but typically is about my fourth choice.

I got the Belkin, and the install system wouldn’t work on my Mac. I was able to configure it manually, and same problem – the router itself wouldn’t connect to the Internet. No amount of rebooting corrected the problem.

Comcast (and their sucky phone system) was no help. They could see live signal to my network, and so declared it working fine.

I trekked to Silverdale and picked up a router I am confident of – a D-Link Rangebooster G. The next day I connected it, and voila – it spoke to the Internet! And the Internet talked back! I was able to get my husband and son’s computers connected to it. My husband’s comment: “Holy crap, it’s the Internet!” (He hadn’t been able to use it for ten days.)

My Mac was being typically stubborn about wireless. It would connect via cable, but not wireless. Macs are a bit of a pain to work on, there are three places you can go to troubleshoot wireless – basic Internet connect, system network settings, and application network utilities. Buried in network settings I found a cached static IP setting. I removed that, restarted my wireless connection, and it worked on wireless too!

I tightened down security, interrupting my husband’s Homestar Runner session. I encrypted via WEP, added Mac address filtering and hid the router ID broadcast. This was all one step at a time, in case any particular setting blew up the ability to connect, but all went well. (Yes, I know WPA is more secure, but my Mac is notably persnickety about connecting to a WPA-secured router.)

I am so glad to have solid wireless restored throughout my house, and so is my family. I never realized how annoying it would be to have to go connect directly any time I needed anything. Plus, I was paranoid about security and virus issues with the direct connection!

I think the crew is properly grateful. ☺

In my post on Why I Blog, I mentioned the Web 2.0 factor, and admitted the challenge I am having in sticking to one platform and toolset. ☺

There are great freeware hosted platforms available for almost any consumer social networking requirement. I’m currently using Google’s Blogger platform. It’s a good service, easy to use and relatively customizable, if a little limited. Wordpress, LiveJournal, MSN Live Spaces, Yahoo360, Vox, Zaadz, and many others offer similar services.

There are also many online photo gallery hosting services. Flickr and Picasa are two that come to mind. I have used a highly customized Coppermine open source photo gallery application on one of my web spaces – it took quite a bit of work to get the interface where I wanted it to, and the old version I have doesn’t support my new Mac’s iPhoto application.

So, I confess. I have been playing. I have two personal web hosting spaces – it’s silly, a bit gluttonous, when actually I would probably be just fine with one. I do have two sets of personal web hosting requirements – a blog site and a photo gallery.

In one space, I’ve installed Wordpress and am working with understanding the application and installing and customizing themes. (It’s all about the look and feel!) In the other space, I have uploaded the iPhoto compatible open source Gallery application and will install and learn to work with that. I may move the application over to a subdomain location on the first space – conservation on Planet Geek.

What is the advantage to hosting this stuff myself? Well… I’m responsible for my site’s:

• Uptime

• Application health and stability (not necessarily a plus)
• Search engine placement
• Community & site policies
• Adjunct site pages
• Domain name
• Owning my own content
• All rights to my content except what is specifically stated

]It’s the difference between leasing office space, subject to my landlord’s terms and conditions for use, and owning office space, with the privilege and responsibility of being able to completely set my own rules.

Am I going to throw any wild and crazy blog parties if I move over to my own space? Probably not, but the libertarian in me likes knowing I could, if I wanted to.

Crossposted from http://www.smugpuppies.com.

The one recurring issue I’m having with my new MacBook Pro is compatibility with my home wireless network. I was offline for pretty much a whole day after getting home from Anchorage until I figured out some workarounds. The whole issue is supremely annoying. By the time 2pm hit on Friday and I was still unable to get it online, I was really tempted to package the Macbook back up and take it in to the Mac store with a big bow on it. Except… I’d left my old notebook PC hardware at the Anchorage office office.

I had a Linksys WRT54GS, with firmware updated to v5. Apparently it is notably not very Macbook compatible per discussion on the Apple boards and elsewhere. I could only get it to work at all with all security turned off, a static IP set within Airport settings on the Mac side. I still had all sorts of net access glitchiness - IM only works occasionally, I can’t IM and VPN at the same time, about a third of web pages in a search result won’t load, and general slow surfing.

Most Mac reference resources suggest using Airport base stations, but my family is still predominantly PC – we have a notebook, a desktop and a network printer as well - and I’d rather stay on the Windows standard side of the fence. I’m afraid the pain I’m feeling now, tweaking one machine to be compatible, could be magnified x3 setting systems up to adapt the other direction.

Today I actually picked up the latest and greatest wireless router hardware, one that is supposedly much more compatible with the Macbook Pro. It’s a DLink Extreme N Dir-655, which will enable me to take advantage of my Airport Express adapter’s faster N speed.

I did make a little progress in the right direction, but I’m still having problems. After immediate configuration, I was readily able to use the DLink using DHCP – one minor victory. And whoa baby is it fast!

I still can’t turn on any sort of encrypted security, though, and working in the IT industry that’s really critical to me. The minute I enable any of the flavors of WPA or WEP, I get the same error: “There was an error joining Airport network XXXXXX.” I was able to quasi lock it down by enabling MAC address filtering and turning wireless network name broadcast off, making it a closed network – but I still need to find a solution for turning on encryption.

Why is this so difficult? Aren’t Macs supposed to be easy to use, plug-n-play, no tech troubleshooting under the hood required? I have probably spent 16 intensely frustrating hours on this issue in the last week.

Argh!

bit the bullet and swapped/upgraded my dated pc notebook for the Macbook Pro I discussed here a few weeks ago.

It’s been, honestly, a rocky ride. While it’s a very sleek, cool new machine, there’s a bit to figure out, and some tasks have been plain old challenging.

The good:

User interface is beautifully thought out.
Parallels, enabling virtual PC import and application use.
The graphics, music and media tools.
Fit and finish of the machine.
Other Mac users have been very helpful. (Thanks Jason, Bill, Brandy!)

The bad:

Why did Mac design around a single mouse button? Right click is very handy.
Applications like Microsoft Entourage are truncated in functionality.
Only one USB port.
Battery life is not quite what I’d hoped for, even in energy saving mode.

The ugly:

MAJOR wireless network incompatibility issues with Linksys router.

I am trying to spend as much time as I can on the Mac system itself, and only reference the PC image where necessary – for PC files, or PC-specific applications like MS Project.

All in all, it’s been taking me quite a bit longer than usual to get things done just because of the learning curve – first I have to figure out how to do it, often there’s something that has to be installed or updated, and then, finally, I can stumble my way into it, with unfamiliar keyboard shortcuts and a new user interface.

The biggest trial is going from being a fairly skilled, technical power user on the PC to a complete novice on the Mac. I hate sucking at stuff! Cultivating a beginners mind is good for me, though, and I could use the dose of humility.