Saturday, May 03, 2008

Drunken De Maio


I don't do many diary style blog posts but today wans;t a typical day. I woke wup at 6:30 this morning wanting, no needeing, to go on a bciylce ricde. This was my firest time down to Ellic0tt City for the biking season. I love screaming down Main street in excess of 25 miles per hour and then having to make the hard right from Main Street onto New Cut Road and climbing out of the saddle to begin the two mile uphill ride back to Montgomery Roaad.

I put 16 miles on the odometer which pushed me over 100 miles for the year so far. I keep a pretty detailed log of my rides and I tend to sandbag the first ride or two each yera on a specivic route. I checked my rather anal-retentive records and saw that this ride beat my best time for that route from all of last year. Yay, me. I credit the new bike shoes and pedals that my wife gave me for Christmas. I get a lot more power going up hills. I'm still not used to stepping out of the pedals at stops so I tend to run more red lighst than I should, which makes me the sort of discourteous rider that motorists hate. Trust me, at that time of day, I'm not risking too many squealing breaks.

When I got home it was time to figure out why the computer in the den no longer connected to the wireless network in the basement. I dusted off a Belkin Wireless network extender I had bought and never got working right. This time I found a website whti tips on how to get into the web interface embeedded in the router rather than the through the useless interface program. I got it working and syncing, but no help for the computer.

That meant a trip down to BigBoxOfElectronics to buy a new wirelless network card. The original was D-Link but when I had FiOS installed, it wasn't strong enough to hook to the wimpy router/moden that Verizon gives. About six months I decided to go name brand and got a Linksys card that was doing fine, but has been slowly decaying. After perusing the choices, I went back to D-Link because their new 802.11n card had two antennas and gave me an upgrade path just in case Verizon ever decided to support that standard.

The card went in without a hitch and immediately found the network extender. Since I was futzing with the network already, I went ahead and chabged from WEP to WPA security since all the other wireless networks in my neighborhood use that. Peer pressure is a bitch.

Then it was time to get ready for not one, but two Cinco Di Maio parties. The first was at a coworker's of my wife who is the PE teacher at one of the schools she works at. Not to traffic in stereotypes, but.... well, nevermind. She throws great parties with a delightful cross-section of poeple. The second party was at my bosses house. I tagged along on the hosue tour and she has a wood shop that puts my son's middle school technical arts wing to shame.

So I managed to drive the two or three miles home without attracting any law enforcement attention. Normally I edit my posts in Microsoft Word and get rid of amy typos and missspellings, but tonight I feel very stream of consciousnness and will see in the morning just how embarrassing this post is.

BlatantCommentDismissing(tm): Really, I was fine enough to drive. Just nto sober enough to blog.

2 comments:

Malnurtured Snay said...

I was wondering why it was your felt the need to bicycle, but not the need to have a dictionary or spell-check on hand.

Anonymous said...

Mayo looks like mayonnaise but it is the Spanish word for May.