Backlog
Although I’m writing a regularly as ever, you may have noticed my postings here getting spotty: two or even three at a time, with a day’s wait between. The problem lies in our wireless network connection.
We’ve had a wireless system for a couple years. Its practical use has been dubious, since the strength of the connection varies sharply throughout our house, and is, at best, a little erratic, even after an upgrade designed to give better coverage to the upper floors. For proper internet work, I stick with a fixed line to my main computer, but I prefer to use my laptop for writing, so I would still use the Ethernet to upload these essays and for occasional fact-checking on the internet. Doing so was slow but tolerable for such small tasks.
Unfortunately, even this level of performance began to degrade. Eventually, we found out why: one of our neighbors was using our wireless connection. I suppose it’s possible that our security protocols aren’t working quite right, and that our neighbor is simply taking advantage of a big hole. It’s even conceivable that he’s unaware he’s using our connection, and not his own—I’ve heard stories of such crossed signals before, and I’m not always aware of exactly which information channels my computer is using at the moment. But we do have a password to the system, and I suspect a deliberate job of low-grade hackery.
This is a problem for several reasons. One: when somebody else is piggy-backing on our bandwidth, our own performance suffers, often dramatically. Two: neither of us relishes the idea of paying for someone else’s internet service, no matter how innocent. Three: the use may not be innocent, and we can be held legally responsible for someone else’s use of our account. Rightly or wrongly, the more rabid recording company lawyers do just that, hounding internet fraud victims even after they can prove illegal downloads were someone else’s doing. Four: if someone can bypass our security to use our wireless connection, there’s every chance they can pick up sensitive data like account passwords and credit card numbers on our computers, since they share files over that same wireless connection. Pretty scary, when I think about the possibilities.
My father-in-law, who is also our technical expert, didn’t think this was much of a problem, and could easily be corrected, but Eileene and I remain suspicious. We pulled the plug on the wireless network and reverted to cables.
Unfortunately, the girls downstairs had grown to rely on the wireless, since the signal was much stronger downstairs, and Kim didn’t have a cable handy. We gave her the cable I had been using for a direct hookup for my laptop. Until we get a replacement, hooking my laptop up to the internet now involves briefly cannibalizing another computer’s hookup. Eileene uses hers nearly 24-7, and digging around the tangle of wires behind my desktop is a pain in the posterior.
So I find myself putting off journal uploads, especially on days when . We should get a new cable fairly soon, since Eileene makes semi-regular visits to Best Buy, but until then, you might want to check whether you’re getting a double helping of curmudgeony goodness when you visit this page.