Wires and Waves
As I talked with Jed I suddenly lost my internet connection. I looked up and saw that my wife was microwaving something. I have a wireless network in my house, and through the wonder of the horrible wireless antenna that Apple put in my PowerBook, I sometimes get to lose my connection when anyone uses the microwave or the cordless phone. Thanks Apple, could you abuse me a little more this month? (I will tell you the other powerbook story and the iPod story when I can write about it without crying)
Jed mentioned how it was only a matter of time before the air was so full of competing radio waves that nothing would work anymore.
Can you imagine if all those waves were visible?! I bet no one would use a wireless anything. Everything you had would be plugged in and shielded with 6 inches of lead. Lead poisoning be damned, just keep those creepy radio waves from shooting through me!
what happened to your beautiful ipod? e.
It decided to spontaneously delete all my music. The beauty of that was that at the same time my laptop had problems and had to get reformatted. IE completely erased.
Not a big deal when you have a 20GB iPod to back up all your stuff on…unless your ipod decided it wants to delete all your music. Which mine did.
I remember the having the same sort of concern when microwave ovens first came out and all the gas stations had signs saying stuff like:
“Warning, denture wearers, microwave oven in use.”
What did that mean? Why are the signs gone now? Did they make microwave’s safer? Did all the denture wearers die?
I’m wondering if all the wireless bombardment I get at home, work, and Borders books causes street lamps go out when I drive under them at night. ‘Cause if that it, I’m ordering one of those lead aprons they give you at the dentist.
I like to route all of the magical juices that make all of the robots operate in my household into the wall through this handy little invention that I like to call “wires”. I’ve never really heard of these “invisible wires”, do they operate on the principles of magic? sorcery? Is my gold a fair exchange for magical robots?
This may be the answer to why I’m always walking around with violent headaches saying things like, “I’m so depressed.”
no matter what, don’t try heating up your iPod in your microwave. i know it sounds like a good idea but turns out it’s bad.
These waves flying everywhere is why the leprechauns have all left. They can see them.
i hear that if you fashion a helmet out of aluminum foil and start stock-piling weapons, you will have no problems at all. Until the aliens start talking inside your head. Believe you me, then it gets tricky.
Josh,
You’ve probably already tried these, but here goes:
Change the channel used by Airport. I’ve heard from a number of people who experienced problems when using the default channel (10), who’s problems went away when they changed to a lower channel (2 or 3, for instance).
Try plugging your Airport Base Station into a different outlet. I read of one person who thought the microwave was causing interference, but it turned out that the microwave was on the same circuit as the Base Station and was chewing up the amperage on the line to the point that it was messing up the power to the Base Station.
Move the airport away from exterior walls. There’s something about some exterior walls (electrical lines, insulating wrap, “leaky” coax cable, pixies) that seems to cause interference in some cases. Moving the Airport about six feet from an exterior wall can help.
Stop wearing your Wizard of Oz Tin Man costume when using your Powerbook. While it provides a nice lap surface upon which to type, large amounts of sheet metal can disrupt the signal. (I understand that the new 802.11oz spec takes this into consideration.)
While numbers 2 and 3 are somewhat apocryphal, numbers 1 and 4 are based on hard science. I hope they help…