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ever have an opportunity to steal
Friday, December 10 2004
Is there anything quite as useless as a Hawking Router, particularly the dual-WAN model? I don't know why I bothered, but today I spent more hours trying to get the damn thing to work. This is the price of trying to live a 2006 lifestyle in 2004, since this equipment is clearly not yet ready for the ancient era ruled by the likes of George W. Bush and Justice William Rehnquist. There are so many things wrong with this router, where do I begin? The power supply is a huge brick from back in the day when Winger CDs were worth something, and when you plug it in to the unit, a spark shoots out as if there's a momentary short. This router is also a wireless access point, but when I tested its range I found it was only about 20 feet in line-of-sight conditions. The signal couldn't get through a single wall or floor.
Despite all of this, I did manage to get the damn thing to work, but only under conditions that varied only a tiny bit from the default. I couldn't change its IP address from 192.68.2.1, and I couldn't change its subnet mask from its default of 255.255.255.0. I could change its wireless ESSID to something other than "default," but such a change made it crash and I had to unplug it and plug it back in afterwards. When I attempted other changes, I usually had such a bad crash that I had to depress the reset button to restore it to its factory settings. Working with a piece of equipment this fragile is a major ordeal, the sort for which I feel I should be getting paid. If I ever have an opportunity to steal large amounts of money from Hawking Technology, you can bet I will exercise it without remorse. There are actually a number of companies, non-profits, and governments out there meeting this description (DirectTV, the Catholic Church, and the State of Ohio, for example).
I've been reading a little of my new book about heavy metal and learned for the first time about the CD Pat Boone made covering heavy metal standards (No More Mr. Nice Guy). Intrigued, I downloaded as many of the songs as I could and found a number of them oddly compelling, including the covers of "Enter Sandman", "Holy Diver," "Smoke on the Water," and "Stairway to Heaven." Less convincing were songs like "Paradise City" and "Crazy Train." Gretchen overheard me listening to the cover of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" and she thought it was the most ridiculous thing ever, but when she heard it was Pat Boone doing it, she reconsidered the situation and proclaimed that it was either "really stupid" or "really great" but, I suppose, not somewhere in between. For her the jury was still out until she learned Boone's motivation.
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