New toys are great, but they always seem to come with some frustration. Some recent examples:

  • I just bought a new laptop with built in WiFi card. It connects fine to the existing access point and authenticates using 128bit WEP encryption. But every five minutes it says it has found more than one connection and wants me to select one (often times there is only one AP found). Call tech support, who suggests reinstalling OS. Turn off WEP on the access point and card, and it seems to fix the problem.
  • Hooking up an older TV for digital cable. Analog cable straight from the jack to the TV gives a good picture. Add in a digital cable box, and the picture starts to go black and white with an audio hiss. Different cables, several different boxes, same problem. Connect coax from the wall to the cable box and run AV cables from the box to the TV, picture and sound are great.
  • Installing DSL. Put on the filters. Connect the DSL modem. Modem bounces between getting sync and losing sync. Spend an hour on the phone with Verizon where they say it is an intermittant problem and need to send someone to check the line. Except that they might be going on strike.
  • Connecting to work's VPN and using Remote Desktop. It all works fine from my laptop, but not the desktop. Even though the desktop can make other TCP connections to the remote machine just fine. </ul> Sometimes techology sucks.