Wednesday 27 July 2005

Pic of the day: No, not a picture from my home, there is way too much open space in this picture. It is from the anime Okusama wa Joshikousei, which is now all over my home, along with hundreds of other anime, pictures and journal entries. OK, thousands of the journal entries, and here is one more.

Home net works

Strangely, my home network actually works. Kinda. Sorta. What made the difference was throwing out the router with built-in wireless access point. The one that had scribbling on the inside of the box when I first opened it, the one I bought at Telehuset in Kristiansand. (Shop there at your own risk.) The new was shrink wrapped, a Jensen rather than SparkLAN. And most importantly, it worked. Eventually.

A CD contained the manual, which was all right. I got started easily enough. The IP address of the router is slightly different, which is actually a good thing. If I had tried this at the workplace instead of the other one, it might actually have worked since the previous router used the same IP address as the gateway we already had, making it very hard to configure.

When it came to running my torrents, though, the problems began. There was a page for setting ports, but it was so non-intuitive that I could not manage to open any ports. Evidently it works like this: You have to call the relevant ports with outbound traffic first in order for them to accept inbound traffic, and you must set the time interval from your outbound signal to the inbound one. That's how it looked like. Anyway, I did not get it to work with BitTorrent, and the company's web site did not contain examples that fit. Luckily I managed to figure out how to set DMZ again. This leaves the computer as open as if it was connected directly to the Net. I think that's acceptable, since that's how it was until some days ago.

***

The bedroom computer is now connected wirelessly. Except... every day when I turn it on, I have to start a service called "Wireless zero configuration". I have no idea how to start it automatically when I turn the machine on, since it is not a program but one of a list of services on the services screen under administrative tools. After I have started it, I turn off another small program that DOES start automatically, and which is probably left over from the previous network card. Alas, I don't know where it starts and what it is called. But it only takes a few seconds to exit it and somewhat more to start the other, so it is no big deal. Spending an hour trying to automate it would take months to get back in saved time. I don't even know if I have months to use it. Not that this is what stops me. I am just that lazy.

Anyway, I am now connected to the Internet on my bedroom machine again. And more, for the first time I have access to the essential parts of each machine on every other machine. So I can work on my journal in the bedroom - not a good idea, since the living room chair is better - or I can use the big disk on the bedroom machine to store stuff. And of course, all my anime are available on every machine. ^^

I celebrated this by watching Okusama wa Joshikosei from my bedroom. It is actually a bedroomy anime too, the title means "Wife and high school girl" or "(My) wife is a female high school student". (At least I think that's what it means. The particle "wa" isn't a verb, the Japanese don't use verbs just to have a verb, but because we do it is often translated as the verb "is".) It is a romantic comedy about a girl who is secretly married to her high school physics teacher. This is socially unacceptable in Japan, and probably elsewhere too, since it would severely distort the objectivity of the teacher! But rather than simply having her move to another school (or even just another class), they go to great lengths to hide the relationship. Her friends (girls) are not idiots, they see that she is in love with her teacher and come up with the craziest ideas to help her win his heart. Meanwhile the poor husband has to act all unconcerned. Hilarity ensues. There is some indecency, more than necessary to be honest, but all pornography is strictly in the brain of the viewer. Not mine, as I have my own things which don't include the panties of high school girls. I enjoy it for the cute story. My favorite is the 4th story (episode 2 part 2) which has no erotic elements at all, but is about a stray kitten.

But actually I used most of the evening to play Sims2.