Reflections on Wifi-The Adventure

Lessons Learned
I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent guy, but I have to admit that my recent trials and tribulations involving establishing a WLAN here at the Big House (as we affectionately refer to our home) took a bit more time and energy than I had hoped. Please understand that I'm not new to Wifi. I have established WLANs for friends/clients in the past, and I have enjoyed reasonable degrees of success. But bridging the distance between floors proved to be a problem. Turns out that setting matter...a great deal. I insist on securing my network, which includes assigning a static IP address for my WLAN card connection. All seemed to be going well, but my connection wouldn't persist much beyond 3 minutes. Finally, I learned at about 2:30 this morning that a valid DNS entry can be a beautiful thing. Honestly, I'm surprised that this little piece of reality slipped my mind (I know better, trust me...), but anything can go horribly wrong at an hour when most sane folks are sleeping. It is now 7:30 PM in the city, and I've had a pretty smooth ride since about 4:35.

I know, you gotta read the directions. Problem is, the directions were of absolutely no help whatsoever. Yes, both the quickstart guide and the product manual recommended various courses of action. The difficulty arose from the fact that the authors either assumed that I knew why they wanted me to follow a particular course, or that a seemingly endless series of nifty-neat screen shots took the place of some well-reasoned expository writing. The writing craft is not dead, nor should it be. This is especially true when instructions may be read by those who don't already know the secret handshake. C'mon folks, assume we're all idiots,and give us some user-friendly instructions. I've been playing with technology since the early 80's, and I can still use a hand every now and then.