Network collapse, Iain's birthday dinner, and new Airport Extreme

I can only laugh. LOL. It all started on Friday at work when my business partner gave me a bag of 7 Apple Airport Expresses. I previously installed them in his palatial home but he recently had his home professionally hardwired with industrial networking gear, so he gave all the Airport Expresses to me.

Me being me, first thing on Saturday morning, I started tinkering with our home network, only that the power point adapters somehow stopped working and the network collapsed, so I spent most of the weekend resetting up the whole thing. LOL.

Meanwhile, I was very happy that our annual meeting for the organisation at which I volunteered was over and done with for another year. I took over MC-ing the whole gig this year, so that caused me a little bit of stress. But it was the best annual meeting we had ever had. I was quite pleased with how things went and many people stayed behind afterwards, not wanting to leave, which was usually a good gauge of how the meeting went. Now that the annual meeting is done, things are going to take on a festive pace - there will be heaps of Christmas get togethers, followed by our European trip just before Christmas. I can't wait. :)

 Friday evening

It was a total fail on Friday evening. First, everyone piked (via Facebook chat). I didn't read Sam's message too carefully and had drinks with a workmate. Then his boyfriend came and joined us. By about 7 pm, Sam texted me and said he was waiting for me at the cinemas. I texted him back and said I thought everyone was piking, so I was having drinks and was going home afterwards. He said he wanted to see a movie still with me, so I quickly got changed and met up with him at Grill'd for dinner. Only that he had a massage appointment at about 8 pm, so I wandered around the shops for a while for a bit of window shopping. I finally went up to the cinemas to pick up our tickets and waited for Sam to show up. 15 minutes ... 10 minutes ... 5 minutes before the movie started but my boyfriend was nowhere to be seen! I texted him, called him, but to no avail. About 5 minutes after the movie had started, I refunded the tickets and went down to the massage shop where I found Sam paying for his massage. Apparently, he lost track of time, so did the masseur, so we ended up not seeing anything on Friday night! LOL. Oh well.

 Saturday

As I said above, I started tinkering with our network on Saturday morning. Actually, I didn't - I merely tried to fix up the situation where the sound on videos natively streamed to our TV was very soft, so I wanted to be able to watch the streamed video with the AV receiver on so that I could turn up the sound. For some reason, the WD TV Live streamer said it could get onto the network, which was when I noticed that there was no data going through the power point adapters. Meanwhile, I added an Airport Express and noticed that there I simply couldn't access the internet on the network.

Seriously, I spent the rest of the day trying to work out how to fix the system to no avail. I was so focussed on fixing the system that I didn't even go down to Wilde Kitchen for lunch. Well, I eventually went down after 2 pm to get some takeaway but that was more of an after thought then what I planned. After all, I was still half-boycotting their new seating arrangements. I did get takeaways though because it was so hot. Meanwhile, thunderstorms were threatening to hit the neighhourhood, so much so that I had to keep watching the BOM radar map as I was picking up Iain's birthday present and attempting to get the newest Airport Extreme from Harvey Norman (they didn't have it - WTF???!!!).

I was glad to come home, even though I was confronted with more frustration as the network refused to play fair with me. By about 6:15 pm though, I had no choice but to put everything down because we had to pick Iain up for his birthday dinner at Purple Olive. I didn't know what I was doing when I was researching an Italian place to go (Iain wanted Italian for his birthday), when we got there and looked at the menu, it so wasn't what I thought I read on the internet! Anyhow, we still had a decent meal, even though the place was crazily noisy, thanks to all the hard tiled surfaces. Don't think I will be going there again soon because of that.

We did drop into IGA on the way home - we bought Iain a bottle of spiced rum and he wanted to pick up some coke to have with it. We took the opportunity to buy a few odds and ends, including two punnets of blueberries for me (I never pass off blueberries!). Truth be told, I actually couldn't wait to get home to try something else I thought of to fix the network. When I finally did have the chance to do it though, it didn't work. Yes, it was an exceedingly frustrating process. I eventually went to bed at about 2 am without practically achieving much.

 Sunday

I slept in a bit this morning until after 10 am. After I got out of bed, well, when Sam let me get out of bed, that was ;), I started playing with the network again. As I was stuffing around, I found that the power point adapter at the bottom of the cabinet in our bedroom, unlike the other adapters, was working (the light indicating a network connection was on), so I quickly removed it and replaced the one in my study to see if the problem was caused by a faulty adapter. Suddenly, the whole network came to life. Yes, just like that, the whole network roared into life!!! I quickly took the opportunity to set up the network and it worked like a charm!

To celebrate the achievement, Sam and I went down to Wilde Kitchen for lunch together.  Guess what? No one was sitting at the high tables again, apart from one of the staff. Everyone else was sitting outside at normal tables. I think these guys are really kidding themselves. I guess they have invested money into fitting out those high tables and seats, so they couldn't very well change them back easily but I really think the recent changes missed the mark and they are paying for them. Goes to show the importance of listening and consulting with your customers before you make a sweeping change, thinking that it is going to work.



After lunch, we went over to Chermie to get my new Airport Extreme at the Apple Store before we went back to New Farm Coles for grocery shopping. When we got home, I naturally set up the new toy and by god was it a beautiful piece of equipment. The ease of setting it up was unreal (it literally took about 5 minutes) and the speed was incredible.

The rest of the afternoon and night was about chores and cleaning up - when I was working intently on the network, I had stuff lying around everywhere. It was so good to finally get rid of everything and get back to order. Once I had done that, I was happy to iron my clothes for next week, then cook dinner for us (Sam wanted lots of pan-fried haloumi cheese, so I fried up two packets, together with some wilted baby spinach in garlic).

Because of the network woes, I didn't really do anything work-related all weekend, which was probably a blessing in disguise.

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