About a year ago, I bought an SMC wireless router. I live in a small space (600 sq ft, maybe) and yet I enjoy having the computer on the kitchen table, on the deck with my morning coffee, whatever.

I don't know what happens, but every few months I can't get connected. I call SMC (Hello, Mumbai!) and they walk me through complicated, deep menus to see what will work. I have the feeling they have no idea, they're just trying everything they can think of. I've gone elbow-deep in menus on both the Mac and the router, to no avail. Finally they find something called "pinging" the modem, which seems to work.

And yet . . .

A few days ago I came home to find that suddenly (and for the fourth time), my computer would not connect wirelessly. Ugh.

I went through the usual routine: Unplug everything. Restart computer. Restart modem. Reconnect router. Pray.

No dice, so this morning I called Apple. There isn't anything wrong with my Mac. The culprit is, most likely, the cable modem or the cable signal itself. It blips, and then everything goes awry and can't reestablish itself until the router is taken back through the setup procedure. I thought I had tried that. I told the nice boy at Apple to just send me an AirPort base station, hoping that Mac-native devices would not fare as poorly as the SMC.

Guess what? Two harmless steps later, the SMC decides that it can traffic between Comcast and the Mac.

Shit, what am I gonna do with two routers? I can only hope that the AirPort one is so sexy that I will pawn off the SMC on someone ready to go wireless. Oy.