Yay! I have internet access from home again! I have restored functionality to our Airport network! Go me!

It turned out to be a combination of two problems. First, that the power supply for our Aiport base station was dead. This was fixed, expeditiously and under warranty, by the nice folks at Compu Pro on Brokaw Rd.

Second, our cable modem was doing that weird thing where it fixates on one computer that's been talking to it and won't talk to anyone else. It was refusing to talk to anything but Daniel's Windows XP machine. (A gauche social move in a household where 2 of 3 computers are Macs, and the network administrator is a diehard Mac-o-phile.) I unplugged the modem and told it that it could sit quietly in a corner all by itself until it felt like playing nice with the Airport base station. A mere 60 seconds of the silent treatment restored social harmony among my network peripherals. We have net. All my base are belong to me!

(Do excuse me, I'm a bit giddy. I don't have a whole lot of experience with the whole fixated-modem problem, and so I've spent an awful lot of time over the past couple of days peering at my network settings, trying to find the mysterious parameter that I had not configured correctly. Silly me.)

I think I need to get a wireless card for Daniel's XP machine.

Anyway, I've been having a pleasant weekend. Daniel and I drove up to Berkeley yesterday afternoon. We stopped by The Other Change of Hobbit, and I picked up a nice stack of books, including Sorcery and Cecilia, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and a Gardner Dozois short-story collection. Then we stopped by Comic Relief so that Daniel could buy the latest Girl Genius. I seem to have fallen behind on all the comics series I was following, and rather than try to catch up, I decided to wait until the trade paper collections come out, and catch up then. (I've kind of been trying to get myself to do that for a while - I'd rather own the trade paperbacks than the individual issues of the comics. But when I used to live two blocks from Comic Relief, and stopped there at least once a week, it was hard to resist the temptation to snap up the shiny new monthly issues.)

After Comic Relief, we went to another old haunt, Yali's Cafe. They've expanded, and now offer free WiFi. I drank an iced tea, and sat for a couple of hours reading Sorcery and Cecilia. I forgot about it this time, but I really meant to bring them a copy of the Realms of Fantasy with my story, "Portrait of an Unidentified Angel" in it. I wrote most of the first draft of it at Yali's.

We wandered around Berkeley a bit. It's funny - last time I was there, I was struck by how many things had changed, but this time around it didn't really seem so different. I mean, Panoramic Interests has renovated another run-down buiding into an aseptically shiny apartment building, and they put a Peet's Coffee on Shattuck (because Berkeley doesn't have enough coffee shops?), and so on, but it's pretty much the same place.

We had dinner at La Note, a lovely little Provencal restaurant where I tried not to be too amused by the earnest discussion of astrology going on at the table behind me. (Ah, Berkeley!)

And this morning, I finished Sorcery and Cecilia, which was great fun, and restored the internet connection, which was not really fun, but was very satisfying in its results. And now that I've done it, I probably ought to take advantage of it to pay some bills and so forth.

Later!