What I've Been Up To

So the major thing is putting together another online journal, this one for my writer's group, the Alliterates. Now, those who have been clicking that link for the past, oh, three months have gotten nothing, owing to a problem with the domain name (tale of woe and intrigue available upon request). So in a blast of semi-creativity, I put together the Alliterate News, which will serve as a clearing house for news from our group. Its an experiment - some of our band are quite chatty, while others make John Salinger look positively loquacious.

Everyday news, personal stuff, political opinions and the like will still be covered here, but I'll put out the occasional release on the new site as well as things get published.

The minor thing is that I am having router trouble. Yeah, its sounds like something you need a laxative for, and it may not be that far off. Since we've gotten Digital Cable in the house, we run both Kate's Mac and mine (and occasionally the PC Laptop) off a router box. Well, a couple days ago the box went on the fritz and lost its settings, so it doesn't work. Now, Major Props to Comcast - their help line was informative, polite, and productive, and we quickly determined the problem was in the router (by bypassing the router entirely, we can have only one machine on a time, but we know the cable works). Major Headaches, however, to Linksys, the router's manufacturer. Their online help was confused, frustrating, and may not have had English as a first language. After a number of failed attempts that involved using third-party shareware, their proposed solution involved a PC, a CD-Burner, and what the on-line tech said was "simple instructions" (I bailed after the second page of detailed description of PC-jargon that had me wandering around outside the Windows shell). So I'm working through it, and will probably have to call back to start from scratch.

More later,