Fuck wireless, and fuck you too.

For Christmas, Jay bought me a wireless router and a matching wireless card for my laptop. I'm sure there are people out there that are thinking "he gave her what", but I assure you, this was an entirely appropriate and appreciated gift. We're both dorks, after all, and it saved me from having to buy it.

Now, he gave it to me right before I was leaving for my parents' house, so I wasn't going to set it up. He was not allowed to set it up for me either - last time he set up some computer-type thing for me when I hadn't wanted it set up, it resulted in the thing being broken shortly thereafter. So he's not allowed to set things up for me anymore.

I finally set the damn thing up the other day. Now, I have to mention here, I've been working in IT off and on for almost a decade.

Holy crap, almost a decade. I need a minute here.



So it's not like I don't know anything about networking or computers or crap, right? The router comes with an "Easy set-up cd!" that I use because I'm lazy. Being that I'm not an idiot, I choose to have a secured wireless network and set up a key for it and everything.

I then tell Rabbit, my roommate, to try connecting to it, since she's got a Powerbook with internal wireless. She can't - oh, because the key that I assigned to the network? Not actually what was put into the router settings by the set-up cd. In fact, none of the security settings I specified were actually applied. Awesome. Fucking shitheel. No wonder everyone else in the neighborhood has an unsecured network.

So I change that, and she's connected. Awesome, I have wireless router. Time to put in my wireless card and get that set up.

The wireless card also has a set-up cd, which I promptly use. I go through set-up, restart, and referee the fight between Windows and the card's software as to who will be in charge. I declare the card software the winner, and it opens up.

And promptly hangs my computer.

I'm sorry, but you really have to try to make that happen. But fine, I'll do a damn hard reset, and you'd better work next time.

It does it again.

I tell it to fuck off and use Windows, except that Windows can't actually find the network that it should damn well be able to find seeing as how the AP is sitting less than ten feet away.

Fine. Fuck you both.

I got back to the proprietary software and wrangle with it for nearly an hour in an attempt to actually get it to save the settings I want and then connect. Finally, finally, it works. I am connected in a wireless fashion, I no longer have cat5 snaking across my bedroom floor, life is pretty good.

Now, I'm also on a green kick, seeing as how it being sixty in January really isn't good for my health in a lot of ways. So, my computer currently goes on standby after twenty minutes of idleness, and hibernates when I shut the lid. In both cases, once I wake it up, it should go back to where it was.

For a while, this was happening. Then, then, we have yesterday. I wake the thing up, and the wireless card won't connect. It saved the settings, the router was up and working, my roommate was having no trouble, but my wireless card would not connect, no matter what I did.

Once it was finally set up, it was definitely under the category of "I push the button and it works". Since it was not cooperating, I pulled the fucking piece of shit card out, threw it onto my couch... somewhere... and proceeded to plug in my damn cat5 again.

This is why we cannot have nice things people, because the nice things are non-functioning pieces of shit.

Jay is all sad that I am not using the wireless card. I told him to go fuck himself. I'm a bit hormonal, so I'm extra angry. As far as I'm concerned, everyone and everything can go fuck themselves/itself. If you want me to use the gift, give me something that actually fucking works.