Just push it

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Hey, aren’t weekends supposed to be relaxing? I had one of those weekends, Sunday anyway. I had big ideas for the day: work out, write a couple pieces, fix my computer network, clean the house, maybe finally get some garlic in the ground. Well, I made it to the gym, and I sat down to send … a … simple … e-mail. And that’s when Sunday went south.

You see, Hunter and I repaired an old computer last week. Basically, we removed a couple of hard drives and reconfigured the new ones in a RAID arrangement. Then I reinstalled Windows XP, all the drivers, everything. We named it Supercircuit, and it’s blazing fast. But I couldn’t quite get my printer to work. Oh, I could make the shared printer work through the other computers on the network, but I couldn’t make it work if the other boxes weren’t turned on. Easy stuff, right? Just install it. And then the other symptoms began to appear. While I could download to the computer, for example, the internet worked, but I couldn’t upload from the computer—not to attach a document to G-mail, not to move a document from the shared folders.

It’s a setting. Got to be on the network card, right? But how many possibilities are there? About 10 million. So four hours later, I’ve reached a state of frustration that’s hard to describe. I was literally hollering curses at the monitor.

I’ll bet you’ve been here before. You have certain skills that you’ve always been able to depend upon, but somehow, when they’re most needed, they fail.

It’s calling me. I can hear its voice from downstairs, “Come down and power me up, big daddy. You didn’t need a fourth computer in a house where only one-and-a-half people live. You needed the challenge, right? Doesn’t your arrogance make you feel small?”

I can only consider myself lucky that Tuesday will give me a whole day to tinker. It’s just an assemblage of parts, right?