Wilde_Guess

A belated Happy Birthday to you.

@manta2g, you do know that fully fifty percent of your fellow Canadians live well south of the 49^th Parallel for a reason, don’t you?

Option two would definitely be up Youngman’s alley.

Meanwhile, I’ve been stuck with a Suzanne Vega earworm for the past several hours.  And, there’s nothing I can do do do duh do do do duh about it.  Not kidding about the earworm, though.

Cheers!

You have five former counties.  You have five current boroughs.  Most importantly, you have five slightly different ways of saying, “at least we’re not Detroit.  Or Chiraq.”

You can tell a Brooklynite, you just can’t tell them anything.  Why are the buildings so tall in Manhattan?  Short buildings get caught in their nostrils.  Why is it called The Bronx?  To assure everyone else that there will only ever be one of them.  What is the greatest achievement of Queens?  That they ran off most of the acutal ‘queens’ to Greenwich Village.  Why is it Staten Island?  New Jersey didn’t want them, either.

… I think I’ll see myself out now…  

[added ten minutes later...] But there is ‘redemption,’ and there’s good in bad in most places.  Suzanne Vega could only have written Tom’s Diner at Broadway and West 112^th Street.  You can practically feel Morningside Heights when you listen to it, whether the original recording or the DNA remix.  Likewise, Billy Joel is a New Yorker from The Bronx, and Upper Manhattan gave us the absolute brilliance of the Harlem Renaissance.

...or an opening joke from a Borscht Belt comedy routine.  Did you ever visit the Catskills in the ‘60s through the ‘80s?  Or, maybe you’re just channeling Rodney Dangerfield or Henny Youngman?  In my mind’s ear, I can hear either man saying exactly that on stage.

You could use the quote to open an Al Czervik based Caddyshack fan-fiction.

Cheers!

“Illin’ noise” is also frozen solid.  I haven’t left the house in almost a week because of it.  It’s forecast to get up to a balmy twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow, though.

Thanks for the laugh, @GeorgeGlass.  If anyone said that fanfiction was easier than original work, it sure wasn’t me.  It’s not harder, either; but the challenges to write well in either one can vary.  Fanfiction for “non-episodic” canon stories almost always involves changes, along with either following canon, or explaining why you took a different path through the story itself. 

That’s why I’m working on Chapter 12, and I’m only putting Charlie Weasley on the Hogwarts Express.  While I’m effectively having to write a compressed story just to get to the ‘Harry Potter as lead protagonist’ part of my story, the other alternative would be a literal cosmic ass-pull, since Harry, Ron, and Neville will have changed that much by September of 1991.  It was tricky enough demonstrating that Petunia Evans had changed that much in Chapter 1, simply by choosing a different husband.

Thanks for the link.  I did find a different site that also works fine, once I remembered to actually check moon phases.  Unlike JKR herself, I’m trying to use real life calendars instead of the “Rowling Calendar.”  So, my student band would have been out late, plus the first Hogsmeade Weekend on Saturday, with Sunday being a full moon. 

Once I remembered to check that too, I got it fixed.  And though the dates are only background ephemera otherwise, I also moved one or two other Hogsmeade Weekends.  I also inserted a statement that even seventh year students were restricted to the castle on full moon nights, and that “student werewolves” never rode the Hogwarts Express out or in on a day with a full moon night.  In “expanded canon,” there were actually two students (Chiara Lobasco and Remus Lupin) who attended and took their NEWTs after having been infected with Lycanthropy as young children.

The real pain is finding stuff like when O and A Level results should come in, and minimum ages for drivers licenses, which did change over the years.

Welcome back to the show, @pittwitch.

Okay…  So, with the headlines, I’m guessing the little twerps got involved in the “River to the Sea” Blood-Libel, and someone in management really didn’t want to go there.  Oh, well…

Good luck getting and training the replacements.

Was “the message” an actual message sent by the two ex-employees that was in extraordinarily poor taste?  Or do you just work for a “high-quality” employer sending a message that they’re “high-quality?”

Happy birthday, @BronxWench!

“What my phone hears” sounds like a brilliant story prompt.  “Amir was an ordinary beat cop, doing his job and living his life.  Until, that is, his posterior became sapient and started loudly expressing its own diverging opinions.”

Cheers!

Of course, that depends on the story itself.  “Yankee” is plot-driven, and sex isn’t necessarily needed.  The original story where I ‘borrowed’ the Dvoraks from, though, is a different story altogether in more ways than one.  It won’t be appearing on the originals side of St. Elsewhere.  Ever.

Cheers!

Great, because it will feature in Chapter 10, even on ‘St. Elsewhere.’  I dropped “Yankee’ to “T” there for greater visibility.

Cheers!

They also found a letter written to the tomb’s late occupant reminding him that the warranty on his palanquin was about to expire.  😝 

A belated “Happy Birthday” to @DemonGoddess.

Cheers!

I won’t say that that’s happened to all of us, but it’s certainly happened to me!  And it only cost the lives of seven “my original fiction universe” characters plus changes in the deaths of four more to stuff my original universe into “Rowling’s Wizarding World/Harry Potter.”  And the resulting crossover is now two month ahead of the “my original-original” story.  Go figure.

Cheers!

Hi, all.

“Not ordinary” is actually a great thing if you can either set it up yourself, or have a friend that can do that for you.  In my case, I only turned the WiFi on on the router when I finally broke down and got a iPhone.  The computer(s) are wired into the switch ports of the ADSL box with good patch cables.  Wires are not obsolete by a long shot.  They just take some effort, and to more than a few people appear to take far more effort than they actually do.

Since I live in “BFN,” my cell coverage is so good that I’m still subscribing to PTSN telephone service at the princely sum of just over $100 per month, since it works, where the cell coverage usually works, most of the time.  Worse, the way the cell towers are set up around me, when my ADSL conks out, so does cell service, and vice versa.  And, the cable company’s Internet also gets wiped out.   Neat, hunh?  So, I can’t even switch over to VoIP, despite my ADSL box having provisions for two lines plus internal battery backup for the VoIP, since I could end up SOL if the internet and cell towers break.  And, they have broken several times in the past year, exactly like I’ve described. 

I have my computers and stuff in my dining room, which admittedly isn’t the best place for them.  I am now the proud owner of a beautiful color printer/scanner/copier/fax that I need to take apart to clean the laser mirrors on it to get it behaving itself again.  I will do that before the end of the year, or pay to have done; but I’m putting it off because that’s an hour or two of my life that I would never get back, and it would be too much like work.  The fancy rig replaced a 1995 monochrome laser printer that has the “same indigestion” going on, and will likely never get set back to right, since no one refills cartridges for it anymore, and they haven’t done so for a few years. 

When the color printer is behaving itself, I can print to it from the iPhone, which really does come in handy sometimes.  And, I could run steel or PVC conduit (for future-proofing,) and wire my house with Cat 6a, and put a “real” switch in a service cubby “somewhere.”  But, I’m retired, and all the cutting, patching, etc would be too much like real work.  I have walked the configuration of the “ADSL Box” to get it where I want it, which is actually a pretty good rig all things considered.

@kagome26isawsome, @BronxWench and @Desiderius Price’s advice is still absolutely spot-on.  Being hard-wired in is better than WiFi, if your circumstances actually allow it.  Back to your original problem; did “fubar.com” ever work for you from your usual computing location?  If so, what “changed” around your house at the same time it stopped working?  Did you get additional housemates?  Or did your “existing” housemates get more WiFi stuff?  Or, did their data requirements go up?  Did you get a new TV and install it wirelessly?  If so, there’s your problem.  If not, you just managed to find a site that doesn’t like WiFi at the edge of its working area.  WiFi transmitters, like anything else, do degrade over time.  So, that might be all, or at least part of the problem. 

WiFi transmitters also operate as hubs instead of switches, even if the ethernet sockets on the device are a switch instead of a hub.  What’s the difference?  A hub is a single “collision domain,” where every device on it can have its traffic “crash” with the data from the other devices.  A switch provides a separate collision domain for every subscriber, so data collisions don’t happen.  If your household got more “WiFi stuff,” you now have more data collisions, so you have reduced service, no matter how good a signal you get.  The first solution below won’t help that much if “everybody” has a smart-phone, plus a computer, plus some if not all of your TVs are all on WiFi, along with your doorbells, your thermostat, and so on.  Improving your signal may still help somewhat, since you never turn down a better signal if you can avoid it.

The easier of two possible solutions for you would be to have the cable equipment moved out of the basement and installed in your parent’s office, or some other sane location on the first floor instead of the basement.  That would put less distance and fewer barriers between your computer and the router, giving you better signal, and better data capacity because of that.  Spectrum could do that for you, and if “you” [the account holder paying the bill] complain properly, they might do the move as a “free-of-charge courtesy” service call, since the location they arbitrarily picked for the equipment isn’t working for you.  Or, your father could do it himself.  Beyond a “new” location for the cable that has electricity, he would only need a length of top-quality coaxial cable, plus a top-quality coaxial cable union to get the job done.  He might need to drill a couple of holes to allow the cable to pass, but this shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

The more “extreme” solution, if your living circumstances allow, would be to hard-wire in to the router in the basement, completely bypassing the WiFi altogether.  Pre-made Cat 6a ethernet cables cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $22-$25 for a factory-made twenty-five or fifty foot cable, and $37-$60 for a one hundred foot cable.  The variation on price depends on the manufacturer, the type of insulation, and the like.  Before buying a cable, make sure that you can route the cable without upsetting anyone, forcing the cable to make hard bends, or subject it to being crushed by doors being closed.  You can “plan” the cable’s route with string, but keep in mind that the cable is much less flexible than string.  Once you’ve successfully routed your string (or whatever,) measure how long it is, and buy the shortest pre-made cable that is longer than the string by enough to be practical.  So, if your string is twenty-six feet long, you would need a fifty foot cable, and you might also need the fifty foot cable if your string is twenty-four feet long, too.  You will need to allow for at least nine foot of length for every story up you need to go if your dwelling has standard eight foot ceilings, plus more for the “wandering around” your cable run might need to do to either avoid or minimize the drilling of holes for the cable. 

You might be able to use air ducts for part of your run.  If you do, make sure the cable you use is either marked “CMP” or “plenum rated” on the packaging or the cable itself.  Plenum rated cable, if a disaster happens, won’t put off poisonous smoke if it catches on fire.  Non plenum-rated cables, which are typically cheaper, might put off poisonous smoke, which is very much not good if problems happen.  If you pass the cable through a grate, make sure the edges of the grate the cable comes in contact with are taped with electrician’s tape to minimize chafing.  If you actually drill holes in any duct work, make sure that the hole is grommeted, and seal the hole between the grommet and the cable.  Don’t enter the supply ductwork right on top of your furnace.  Better yet, if you do use ductwork as part of your route, try to use the return ducts as much as possible over using the supply ducts.

You might also be able to run the cable through a grommeted and sealed hole at the nearest window frame, up the outside wall of your house, and back in through another grommeted and sealed hole in the window frame into the room where you use your computer.  You would use “spiral-wrap” cable shielding for the outside portions of your run, and either nail, screw, or glue cable staples or saddles and zip-ties every few feet to support the outside cable run and keep it “out of trouble.”

All of the above are suggestions based on the assumption that you (or your father) are possibly somewhat comfortable with “homeowner DIY” tasks but are not professional cable installers, and do not want to hire a network cable installer to do the job for you.  It also assumes that you don’t have a local friend to do all of this for you.  While I just noticed that I am much physically closer to you than I realized, I’m still south of I-80, and you’re still north of the “Cheddar Curtain,” even if you’re somewhat “Milwaukee-ish” or “Kenosha-ish.”  And when I was still doing this stuff routinely, I’d always had my employer buy the top quality tools I used, which does bugger-all for me now.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing to fix things.

Hi, @Desiderius Price.

I understood her to be saying that the equipment was all in the basement, and that when she used her parents’ office on the first floor that she was one floor over it, where she was normally (presumably) on the second floor or higher.

As far as that goes, while having a separate cable interface and router is still quite possible, you don’t really see it anymore in an “ordinary” home environment, and I haven’t seen it that way in an ordinary home environment in over a decade.  

Like @BronxWench suggested, the problem might be more with the site or your router.

While I’m not personally impressed with Lenovo, they aren’t necessarily horrible.  With the computer itself being only two years old, and with others in your house having similar problems, I’d hold off on buying a new adapter, or if you buy it, I wouldn’t open it right away.  If you bought it but didn’t need or open it, you can always take it back to the store for a refund.

If others in your house are having problems, the first thing to check is the “first common denominator,” which in this case is the router or internet connection itself.  So, I would concentrate on that as a first step in troubleshooting.  The router itself might need an update, or there is a chance that the router itself is starting to go south.  Routers tend to last for a long time, but they can go bad far sooner than average just like anything else.

Two years old is (or should be) new enough that you can run the latest versions of the Chrome OS and browser.  You might want to have both the computer itself and the browser (if Google makes you update the Chrome OS and Chrome Browser separately) check for updates.  But make sure you’ve backed up your stuff first.

Good luck.

Hi, @Deadman.

The new or new-to- @kagome26isawsome USB WiFi adapter might be just what the doctor ordered.

“Factory reset” could be a cold-boot, or wiping out the disk and applying the ‘factory image’ of the computer as of when it was manufactured.  She never said what kind of laptop she’s using. 

Though, mentioning a ‘factory reset’ does imply that her laptop is a consumer Windows or Google machine.  While some ‘gamer’ Windows machines also come with ‘factory-reset’ media, it’s usually assumed that a gamer or corporate IT department has its own ideas on how to load an operating system and such, so they don’t typically bother.  Linux and MacOS computers are their own unique animals, too.

Cheers!

@Desiderius Price and @BronxWench gave you the first steps.  After backing up your story, and anything else you don’t want to lose, then you can check on what’s actually going on.  First, how old is your laptop?  Is it a Microsoft based, Mac based, or Google based computer?  Can it even run the latest version of its operating system?  Is it a ‘gamer,’ ‘corporate,’ or ‘consumer’ laptop?  ‘Consumer’ computers tend to go pear-shaped first, followed by the ‘junk’ corporate, the ‘good’ corporate, and finally the gamer machines when they actually go bad.  This is more pronounced with non-Apple made hardware. 

What browser or browsers do you use?  The problem might be the browser after all.  If you haven’t yet done so, try upgrading your browser to the latest version your computer can actually run.

How do you connect it to the Internet?  Do you connect anything else to the Internet that way?  If so, how are the other devices working?  If you connect via a combo router-interface box like most people do today, you might actually be having problems with that.

If you’re using ‘wireless’ to connect to the router box, ‘something’ you or your neighbors just recently started doing might be causing the problem.  Or, your wireless Network Interface hardware might be starting to go bad.  If that’s the case, the USB replacement, or replacing your existing USB Network Interface with a new one might help.

If you’re actually hard-wired into your router-interface box, you might check the condition of your cable, or try a different socket on the router.  Or, you might try to connect via wireless.

I hope this helps.  Please let us know what you find.

Thanks.

Don’t forget Winona.  And here’s a link for “six degrees of separation” with a degree or two left out.

“Bonus Points” if you can list the degrees I’ve left out.  Cheers!

He was a very good actor in many things.  It would have been nice if he’d stuck around healthy for a few more years, but eighty-three isn’t young, even now.  All of us who appreciate a well-acted role will miss him.