The Wi-Fi Miracle

Aging with Technology

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It has been a really weird morning so far, and as a result I am getting an extremely late start getting a blog out today.  For starters I was up pretty late last night watching episodes of Lost Girl on Netflix.  Neither of us really seemed to want to get out of bed this morning, seeing as for both of us it was a holiday.  The original plan was to go up to my mother-in-laws and set up a printer.  However there were several other issues that needed to be dealt with at all.  She is in her 70s, and the fact that she is on Facebook is pretty damned impressive to me.  However technology as a whole is this black box for her, and she seems to be unable to decouple the existence of the internet with the existence of her laptop.

For weeks she has complained that her laptop isn’t working, and in truth it works completely fine.  What is at fault however is her internet connection.  Quite simply put she doesn’t have one.  That is not to say she does not sometimes have one, but internet is not a thing she pays for.  Instead years ago I installed a wifi router at my nieces house that lives adjacent to her.  The intent was to provide me internet access when I was up there during a family illness so I could continue to work while still being available.  By some freak if science the wifi signal was usable over at my wife’s mothers house. 

The Wi-Fi Miracle

Using Google maps to measure the approximate distance it is well over 200 ft, and passes through lots of walls between the access point at and the location where my mother-in-law has her desk.  It was absolutely amazing that it ever worked, let alone has continued to work until recently with a over seven year old wireless router.  But she cannot grasp or does not seem to believe that it is simply an issue of not enough signal strength.  At this point it could be so many different things, her new laptop could simply have a weaker wireless card, since good wi-fi coverage is just an assumed fact these days.  It could be that she piled more stuff in the back bedrooms, which the signal has to pass through.  Or it could simply be that the wireless access point is slowly dying.

Whatever the case she feels there is a  grand conspiracy to deny her access to Facebook.  In truth I was really not ready to deal with this issue today as I have never attempted to set up a wireless repeater, let alone tried to make two different access points work together.  We have a graveyard of old wireless routers laying around the house as we seem to burn through them every couple of years.  The last thing I wanted to do was try and install a semi-functional technology in the home of someone completely technologically confused…  and end up having to do house calls two hours away.  So we rescheduled for next weekend, and this week I need to research some options and get something ordered from Amazon.

Gauntlet Revival

Hammerwatch 2014-01-19 16-29-59-38 I am not really sure if yesterdays Steampowered Sunday post adequately covered how much I really enjoyed playing Hammerwatch.  By the time I stopped to write my blog post, I had played roughly 66 minutes.  By the end of the day I had logged well over 4 hours.  Shortly after posting my blog entry, I hooked up with 3 other friends and we discovered a bunch of new things about the game.  Firstly when doing multi-player you have the ability to add crutches.  Since we were still obviously learning the game, we added two really important ones.  Firstly we gave ourselves unlimited lives, which allowed us to brute force a few horrible areas of the game by simply respawning back into combat and bashing our faces against a wall until we got through it.  Additionally we added hit point regeneration… which was extremely slow… but just enough to help take the edge off things a bit.

With these added bonuses… we were able to push through to the third set of stages and down two world bosses.  I have to say the game just keeps getting more enjoyable and trickier.  It seems like each of the character classes has some really strong abilities.  The paladin that I was playing eventually got the ability to proc a stun on mobs, as well as the ability to deflect missile attacks from an ever widening frontal arc.  The warlock began getting some life drain abilities which greatly improved its sustain.  While I didn’t pay that close of attention to the Ranger or Wizard they both also seemed to get more and more lethal over time.  I have to say sale or no, this game is very much worth picking up.  The above image if from a really cool Gauntlet bonus level that we unlocked.  So much nostalgia. so many feels.

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