Frustration

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So, my mum asked me to make a playlist for her wedding; it’s only a few people who’ll be there, and my mother (as usual) wishes to shake her bootie (I think, knowing my mum, that’s about the best term for it).

This is – in theory – easy. I have a vast collection of music, and I did in a past life DJ. So, plan was I’d sit down at the Mac, connect to the EntertainmentMac and throw together a playlist of 70s and 80s (and possibly some 90s) music that my mum could get her groove on to. Yeah.

In the last few days the Router decided, somewhat randomly, that instead of taking the full 128bit insane-o-line-noise like password that we’ve been using for the past year it would, instead, take only the first 8 characters of it.

This hasn’t been too much hastle, it’s been annoying, certainly, but not insane amounts of hastle because all I had to do was chop the passwords down on the connecting computers and suddenly network connectivity came back. I’ll grant it took me quite a long time to work out why the newly installed G4 laptop wouldn’t connect. But once I’d got there it was all fine and dandy. Except I’d forgotten about the evil that lurks upstairs.

See the G5 has no posh apple gidgets to connect wirelessly, instead in has the fairly dismal Buffalo Airstation. It only has this because Nikki and Kate are very lovely and understanding my plight gave me one of their unused ones. I say dismal because while it functions adequately it’s certainly got it’s quirks and one of it’s major quirks is that the default IP address of the one they gave me is not mentioned online or in any manual anywhere. I’m convinced I wrote it down. I put it on a stickie or something. But… I’ve had to reinstall the mac, the ent mac and the laptop since then and I can’t find this vital piece of information.

And Nikki is out.

And so I’ve spent a frustrating hour going through all the ‘default’ IP addresses I could find:

192.168.1.1

1.1.1.1

192.168.1.169

192.168.11.1

Trying to find out if I can get it’s IP address from it’s MAC address (theoretically, yes. Easily? No). Fiddled with resetting it, trying to use the auto-magic-connect-to-a-router (it connected to a neighbours one!). I’ve wrestled with a strong desire to hurl it from the house, along with all the other shonky pieces of crap that muck up technological equipement. And instead decided to wait, and I’ll do the music tomorrow, or whenever I’ve spoken to Nikki. Assuming she can recall it’s default IP address. Otherwise I suppose I can write a little script that cycles through and pings each IP address from 1.1.1.1 to 254.254.254.254, until it finds it. But I fear that might take some time. Why Buffalo did this I don’t know.

At any rate, I’m going to go and spray the car, which while it’s not that rewarding (in so far as I’m doing a gash job incredibly quickly) is, at least, something I can actually *do*.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.