Radio Radio

I bought a Belkin wireless-G router in Oxford two weeks ago. I mean, I happened to be in Oxford and I went shopping... they don't have a better class of peripheral up there or anything. It took more than the advertised three minutes to set up but I think they were being optimistic. My personal laptop and its professional counterpart are both online at the same time now and I can move from room to room without losing the connection. (I have two rooms.) Mission accomplished!



The upgrade was intended to allow me to a) work from home and b) simultaneously and constantly run peer-to-peer software: the company V.P.N. is on one machine and eMule is on the other. Unfortunately, adding the router created T.C.P./U.D.P. port issues that eMule didn't like. The help file was in German. I didn't know what D.C.H.P. was. I'm not entirely sure how I fixed it but it was a combination of advice from Adrian (what lives with Alice) and four hours' "trial and error", plugging numbers and settings into various boxes until it stopped complaining. The breakthrough may have been telling the router to forward a range of ports instead of the precise address the program needed, but don't quote me on that or why it makes a difference.

While eMule was down I made the discovery that you can watch whole episodes of Battlestar Galactica in eight-minute parts on YouTube! In this clip from S03E04, Adama finds an ingenious way to get fighter ships past the orbital defences of New Caprica to rescue his people on the ground. (Battlestars can jump from point to point in space using "Faster Than Light" technology but they can't fly in an atmosphere themselves.) I'm usually down on these epic C.G.I. sequences because too often they come at the expense of original story ideas but the Top Gun fan in me came screaming out of the closet when he saw that. And I HATE Top Gun.

For my next trick, I was going to network my two machines together. But the wizard didn't work. Does anyone have any pointers for me?

People bitch about Microsoft but I'm using XP features that I've never used before and, unlike Windows 98, they work. When I damaged an external hard drive I thought I was going to lose 40GB of personal files but my tech friend, Ed, fixed it using Remote Assistance. I was in Gloucestershire, he was in Yorkshire and neither of us needed to get up off of the sofa.