My WiFi Problems
For a couple months now, I've been experiencing intermittent connectivity problems with my wifi (802.11b), which have resulted in countless hours of troubleshooting. I only have 1 wifi device in the house, making it difficult to isolate the problem to the wap or the wifi nic.
After fooling around with my location, the wap, the nic, various settings on both sides, quite a few reboots, I ended up with at least a few refreshing 'that must have fixed it' moments... each of which of course were eventually followed by frustrating 'crap.. this fixed it last time' moments.
Jeanne's Phone Problems
Both of us typically use our mobile phones, but we do have a minimal service landline for important things like ordering pizza, staying in touch all the brownie moms, and of course giving all the donation cold-callers a place to contact us when they need more money. We use our landline phone at most a few times a week.
Back in December, we picked up a new phone for our landline, some AT&T model that epinions rated the highest for quality & features. Jeanne uses it much more than I do; in fact, she tends to use it in the evenings when I'm working on the laptop and the girls are in bed... She noticed it seemed to have intermittent problems with it's signal. She usually makes an effort to let me know when this happens, but it happens that at that particular moment, I'm focused on my own problems with the wifi signal. No red flags or anything, just a nice refreshing 'that must have fixed it' feeling as I get myself back to work.
Anyway... duh.
Jeanne was making a few quick local calls today as I was running a continuing ping to one of my servers, watching for a pattern to the problems... I literally watched the pings stop & start as she turned the turned the phone on and off (respectively).
Feeling like a complete dork now... time to upgrade some hardware.
Print | posted on Sunday, February 05, 2006 1:51 PM