Gadabout

Wednesday was a scattered day for me. After dropping Kelly off at school, work started immediately with a meeting. After that, I helped Kirk with a GDSII reader bug until 11:30, when we all drove up to the Red Lobster for lunch with the Egyptians. I ate halibut, too much. Carsten and I stopped at Powell's Cascade Books to look for GTK+ books, and I ended up buying the GNOME/GTK+ Programming Bible. Then we scurried back to work, where we had another meeting, after which I raced to the woods to meet Jean for a short walk around the nature trail. Then back to the office to help Kirk work on his bugs again.

When I got home, there was no rest for the weary, as I had inadvertantly screwed up printing on the Mac when experimenting with the DSL modem. It turns out that when I temporarily unplugged the Airport wireless router hub from my ethernet card, I made Appletalk silently switch to the printer port! So it was spewing garbage to the printer, sitting on the printer port so that no application could send work to the printer, and failing to allow file sharing between the desktop and laptop machines. Switching Appletalk back to the ethernet port made all three bugs magically go away.

I was talking with Jean about this after I had fixed printing but before I had completely sussed out the total pathology, and suggested that this made me want to buy Norton Utilities. But as in the last few cases where I've had problems with the computer, NU would not have told me anything useful. It just took good old-fashioned detective work, RTFM and a bit of cussing.

I got up early this morning to go to the bathroom and as I was heading back to bed, Kelly called out to me. I ended up sitting in bed beside her for the last half hour, not sleeping, and not doing anything useful. I hope she still has a good day today, despite the missing sleep in the morning.