When things just work...

My computer would not print today. All day, printer jobs just got stuck in the queue on my eMac and would not get sent to the printer. I restarted my Mac. I power-cycled the router. I hooked the printer up to another port on the router. I tried and re-tried, and finally I went on to other things.

Then tonight I could not connect to my shared iTunes library from my wife's iBook. Odd. I could also not connect to my computer's shared drives on our network. Double odd. So I checked the DHCP Client Table in our router from the iBook and only three devices were found: the printer, the Wii, and the computer I was using. I went back to my eMac, which could send and receive data over TCP/IP, entered the IP of our router, and it could not locate it. I literally said to my wife, "My computer can connect to the internet but our router doesn't know it's connected to the network."

You probably already know what was wrong. Well, it took me a few more minutes to realize that my eMac had, sometime in the morning, disconnected from our LAN and hooked itself up to an open WiFi network in our building. I ran to my eMac, connected it to our LAN, and BAM! Everything works.

It's sort of like beating a boss level, wouldn't you say?

Liquid Cake Frosting

I enjoy myself a nice tall glass of cream soda from time to time. It's not the kind of pop one can just crack open at any old time--it's best when consumed from a glass, not a can, and preferably after a meal. Perhaps I just enjoy the taste of cold, sparkling vanilla, or perhaps I enjoy that it cannot be quickly quaffed. It's best when sampled a bit at a time over the course of a good movie or internet-surfing session. At any rate, it's delicious stuff and if you haven't had any in a while, you might want to give it a try.

So far my Firefox experience has been a good one, mostly due to another great theme which was recommended to me by some posters on the IGN Mac boards. It's not quite as zippy as Safari, but far more reliable, and far more extendable thanks to myriad plug-ins and whatnot that have been written over the years.

I had a mean case of the hiccups tonight which was cured in about 30 seconds thanks to a technique I read about back in February. I'm not kidding, it seriously worked. :)

Saving Soles

I just finished a book entitled "Rescued," by John Bevere and Mark Andrew Olsen, and I highly recommend it for pretty much everyone. It's kind of an adventure story, but with an amazing spiritual twist near the end. I don't want to give away much, so I won't, but if you're looking for a good book (that is, incidentally, a fairly quick read as well) to pass the time, you should check it out.

While I was finishing the book I took a short break and threw a pair of my old shoes in the laundry. One of my uncles told me about doing this a while back, and I figured I'd try it on a pair of Vans I got about two years ago that had become extremely soiled. They were, most recently, my work shoes for my summer job, which often involved outdoor work as well as floor waxing. So I threw 'em in the wash, along with a couple shirts and a dirty pair of jeans, and they seem to have turned out just fine. One might even say they have been given new life, since I was about to give up on them altogether due to their thoroughly dirty state of existence. I once extended the life of a pair of Vans by several months with the application of several layers of glue where they were wearing out on the bottom. I guess the lesson here has something to do with Vans, or perhaps washing machines. I'm not sure.

This morning I also tried, once again, switching to Firefox as my main browser. I go through this phase every few months, and usually end up going right back to Safari, but perhaps this time it will last a bit longer. I found a cool theme for Firefox which greatly helps too. So we'll see how it goes, but don't be too surprised (not like you would even know, though) if I'm back to Safari by the end of the day. :)