10:45 AM Jun 1, 2005

by Rob Ritchie

There’s an iMac in my house, and I’m not exactly sure how it got there. I came home one evening, and Mrs Agnostic had set it up in her sewing room / video editing parlor.

“Honey, can we hook this up to our network? It has an Airport…”

Uh, ok, but we’ll have to get one of those wireless routers you said were too expensive….

“Ok, let’s get one this evening.”

So, off to Best Buy to buy a Linksys wireless router. I have a little trouble hooking it up, because the cable conglomerate that beams high-speed Internet access into my abode doles out IP addresses with a teaspoon at a frequency that would starve a llama.

(Wow, obscure jargon, mixed metaphors and general nonsense! This post is going great!)

So, anyway, we make connection between the iMac and the legacy desktop PC named Dickweed (who can already see which way the wind is blowing and is trying to make himself as helpful as possible) and we amuse ourselves accessing MP3’s in the shared folder on the Windows PC through the air and playing them on the iMac.

“Honey, why can’t I get to the Internet?”

Um, because we use AOL as our broadband provider, and AOL isn’t loaded on the Mac. I dig out my spare AOL disk and stick it into the iMac, and it installs just great. AOL tells me that it can see the cable modem, so I try to connect up.

And it doesn’t connect.

I reconfigure, being certain to tell it to use the Airport to find the modem.

And it still doesn’t connect.

OK, I’ll skip over the many additional reconfigs, the many minutes of cursing, and the seemingly-interminable time dealing with AOL tech support on the phone.

The upshot: AOL does not support high-speed access for Macs.

Go back and read that previous sentence again: I needed it repeated several times before I got it.

AOL. Doesn’t. Support. Macs.

Yesterday, I called up and cancelled AOL broadband support, and got Road-Runner. (I still have my old AOL account for email and spam collection, but I’m not using them to manage my Internet access.)

I come home at the end of a hard day (including approximately 90 minutes of on-phone time trying to explain to AOL and to the local cable conglomerate what I wanted to do), turn on the iMac and….

…get right out to the Internet as easy as pie. Through the friggin’ air!

My admiration for the iMac grows and grows. Soon, I’ll be as bad as this guy.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the....

5:35 PM May 26, 2005by Rob Ritchie

Is it possible to buy happiness?

Before last Saturday, I would have answered with a resounding No!

Since then, I bought one of these and or the first time in years, I have music in my life again .

The week before, I bought one of these for myself (and yes, for you keeping score, we got one for Mrs. Agnostic a few months ago) and I'm remembering how much fun it is to drive to work.

And I'm happy. So happy, that I'm taking more interest in my work and less in this blog.

I'm not going to shut it down or anything drastic.

But...I'm so happy, it's hard to bitch. And it seems that that's what I mostly do around here.

La-dee-da-dee-dum! Zoom!