Back So Soon?

Just when I realized it had been longer than I thought since I posted anything, my laptop did me wrong!

I'm sure I've mentioned before that the firewall at work keeps me from checking my emails or going to any social networking or personal forum sites, which is what it thinks most of our blogs are. It lets me get to the Big Name blogs, like the ones in my Working Group links (except for Power Line - it thinks that's a message board and won't let me near it), so at lunchtime whenever I bring my lunch to work, I read the Important (to me) News and Opinion sites.

When I find an article that grabs my attention, I paste the link into an email with the subject line, "Good Articles," and send it to myself at home. A few days ago I found some that were so alarming, I made my subject line, "Holy Cr@p! Articles," but that's very unusual.

But then I get home and I barely have enough time to eat some dinner before running out of the house for Bible Study or my Financial Peace University class (which just ended - I'm a university graduate!) or whatever else is going on, and then stopping at the grocery store afterward, because I seem to always be on the lookout for more bananas whose primary color is yellow and not green (and also whatever else I need). And then when I'm back at home again and (on Wednesdays anyway) have to watch and find out that stupid Casey STILL hasn't been voted off American Idol, and then I can sit down and check my email and the Forbidden Blogs, and then I'm too tired to muster up the ire to post even the most alarming news, because I still have to do all my bedtime things like prayer and Bible reading, and a little sleep would be nice too.

Now, back to where I started, which was the realization that despite all the other things I have to do, I really do want to carve out some time, so all those Good Articles don't become stale old news and so my (possibly misguided) pearls of wisdom can be thrown before swine and clean animals of all kinds.

Well, the other night, my computer did one of its regular automated updates, and for most of them it just tells me it's done and shuts up about it. But this was one of the ones where it pesters me to Restart Now or Restart Later, and of course I'm always in the middle of something, so I tell it to leave me alone now and Restart Later. That night, after I had finished what I was doing, I let it Restart Now, and I got in my jammies, and then I shut it down when it was done with the restart.

In the morning, after I booted up, it couldn't find the internet! I went to the icon on the lower right that looks like a speaker or an aerial view of an amphitheater but that has nothing to do with sound or theatrics (except for at that moment, when it was quite dramatic) but is for the wireless connection, and it said to double-click to find wireless networks.

I obediently did just that, and it opened up to show me my roommate's wireless network with all the bars. So I selected it and hit the Connect button, but instead of connecting, it told me, "Another application is controlling the wireless adapter." Huh?

So I tried the old, unused icon that looks like a monitor with wireless signals going out the side, and that one told me the computerese equivalent of "It's not MY job!" too. I unplugged my roommate's internet router and plugged it back in, just in case it had lost its ability to send the proper signals, but that didn't help any.

No internet! No ability to take my laptop to some "Free Wireless!" coffee shop location, because my laptop's internet workhorses had both just gone on strike. And I had to get to work, so I didn't have any more time for trouble-shooting, not to mention that I was out of trouble-shooting ideas.

In a momentary stroke of genius before I left the house, I slipped my laptop into my laptop-friendly backpack and took it to the IT guys at work, who relished the thought of a computer puzzle to solve.

What happened was that when the nice man came a few months ago to reload my laptop after it had become corrupted, the reinstall gave the Intel wireless adapter (the amphitheater-shaped icon) all the control of connecting to wireless networks. But the latest automated update must have stomped all over that control without actually giving control back to Windows (the monitor-shaped icon), leaving me blind to the virtual world. But the IT puzzle-solver gave control back to Windows, so there shouldn't be any more stomping of that kind in the future, and now I can see!

As for those going-stale articles, they'll be coming soon. But first, I have a few things to do, one of which is to try to find some yellow bananas. I'm out.