jimsjournal
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The rain, which had never been heavy, stopped later in the morning and I went out for a run, following my usual route along the bike path. I had been thinking of doing four miles but once I got warmed up I decided to go a bit further and ended up doing five and a half miles. Light rain, not much more than a drizzle, began about halfway through my run but it felt good. As usual there were lots of people on the bike path... joggers, walkers, roller-bladers and, yes, even people on bicycles.
Fixed lunch for Nancy and me after my run... whole wheat pita bread stuffed with lettuce and onion and green & red peppers and brocolli and taboule salad and some sliced turkey breast. It's nice being home together... Tuesday we had eaten whole wheat pita with tuna salad. Monday had been salad plates (red leaf and romaine lettuce with celery, onions, carrots, greenbeans, peppers, and sliced hardboiled egg with a mound of potato salad in the middle... my own homemade with small red potatoes with the skin still on, green peas from my garden, low fat mayonaise, and finely chopped red onions, celery and green peppers.)
Sean had been bugging me about when can we hook up the network, huh? As I think I had mentioned here (but I'm not sure 'cause I was discussing it in email with Bonnie recently so maybe that makes me think I talked about it here) we've been planning on setting up a LAN for our computers... Nancy's computer (in our bedroom) and Jennifer's computer in her room and the current "family" computer in the kitchen. The kitchen computer is the one with the cable modem for internet access. The plan was to hook them all up in a network... and the kitchen computer would become Sean's. And, at some point soon, I would buy a new computer, one that would be my computer... and I would probably put that theoretical new machine in the den. So, weeks ago, I bought a Linksys router and a bunch of type five cable but have not found time to set things up. Sean keeps asking... so finally I had told him that before we went around drilling holes and running cable, we should make sure that we can get things configured properly... so I set him the task of hooking up the router and the kitchen PC to test the system.
This kept him busy for a few hours on Monday.... hooking the cable modem into the router and then connecting the router to the ethernet card in the PC. Hooking it up was easy, but configuring it so it would work was not.... Finally, Monday night I took a look at it. I was able to confirm that the PC was okay and then I brought up the administration console for the router (it's browser-driven, just bring up IE and type in the router's IP address) and configured it... but I could not make internet connections, could not reach any web sites. Everything was okay physically... I could bring up a DOS window and ping various IP addresses out on the web. Called Linksys tech support and they suggested that I should up-grade my browser (was using IE 4.7) because IE 5.0 or higher was recommended. So I downloaded and installed IE 5.5 and tried again but still couldn't get it. On Tuesday we fooled around a little bit more.... Sean actually spotted the problem but I misunderstood what he meant... he was pointing to the machine name and domain name. I knew the machine name was correct and I thought the domain name was right because I thought (but apparently I misunderstood) that the tech support guy had confirmed it... but apparently he was just speaking generically, not specifically. Sean and one of his friends were working on it today, corrected the domain name and it worked.
Sean immediately wanted to start drilling holes so he could get things set up in his room... I told him to just move the router and modem to our room (we have a cable walljack) and just run some type five cable down the hall (only as a temporary measure!) to his room, just like he does sometimes with a length of coax to tap into cable for his tv. Now I'll have to pick up a couple of ethernet cards for the other two computers.
But... a quiet day... a nice long run... a pleasant lunch... sit around with Nancy, drinking coffee and reading books... Nancy did get around to doing some work with her flower garden... and I emptied the dehumidifier in the basement and cleaned the cat's litter box... yeah, very hard-working productive day... Jennifer has been attempting to organize stuff, gathered up a number of old VHS tapes... this evening I played one that was taped at my father's 80th birthday (fall of 1986) and also at Jennifer's 5th birthday (spring of '87). We got some chuckles over Jennifer and Sean as little ones...
The fireworks display has been rescheduled to Friday night due to the weather. There was scarely a sprinkle of rain this afternoon but it remained very cloudy, low-lying clouds... we had had weather like that a few years ago and it lessened the spectacle of the higher rockets... they disappeared into the very low clouds and the clouds turned pretty colors but it was difficult to see the actual explosions. The rescheduling was a good idea because a thunderstorm hit this evening, at just about the time the display would have reached its climax... and electrical storm with heavy rain is not a good thing to mix with thousands of people attempting to all reach their cars and drive home at once... I'm hoping for good weather on Friday.
And that was my quiet 4th of July in Rhode Island.
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