Archive for January, 2008

C Clips

Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

CClip
From londonskaters.com

Our family has been doing a lot of inline skating since my youngest and I got skates for Christmas. My older daughter and my spouse have had their skates for a few years. I recently replaced the long-overdue brake pad on the formers skates; the pad was worn down to the screw that holds it in place.

Next up: the bearings. I was itching to see what they actually look like and to feel it in my hand, pictures only say so much. I knew my daughters did not avoid standing water when skating, so the skates were ready for some bearing love. Taking the wheels apart looks so easy on You Tube, so I got right to it. I popped off the wheels, hooked out the bearings and was ready to cleanse away the grit.

Hold on, not so damn fast. Before you can get to the grit, you’ve got to take off the covers. To take off the covers, you need to pop out the c-clips. That also looked easy on You Tube.

I’m here to tell you, it’s NOT. Sure, some popped right out, but almost half refused to come out. You may know that each wheel has a set of two bearings, so 2 bearings X 8 wheels = frustration and sore fingers. It took me nearly two hours to get out all those damn things. These are not high-quality bearings to begin with, I will probably replace them soon enough.

Next up: putting the c-clips back in, I can’t wait for that!

How does she always know?

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008


Zoey

I’m sitting in the living room, and our dog Zoey walks past. Normally she would walk up to me and huff or stick her snout under my hand. Not this time; she heads directly for her crate.

My wife is upstairs running the water in the tub. Water running in the bathtub is a nightly ritual for our family, with two daughters to bathe. Normally this doesn’t bother Zoey, it’s always been this way.

But she knows, she always does; my wife is filling the tub for Zoey’s bath. Now the bathroom door is shut, and my wife has yet to pour any dog shampoo. So how the hell does she know?

Wii Have Connected

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

WRT54GS + Wii

What could be simpler? I have a wireless router (Linksys WRT54GS, firmware version 4.71.1.) I have a Wii. Therefore, Wii are connected. Didn’t work like that though.

I spent three days on and off, trying to connect. I tried what felt like ALL the suggestions on the Internet, from Nintendo’s to anyone with a computer and the willingness to write about it. Nothing worked.

Then, a crazy suggestion from another blog. It worked for the author, but surely not for me. No other suggestions worked, so…

But, WTF, what’s one more failed attempt?

The author was able to connect, not by going in the Wii’s menu for manually entering TCP/IP addresses, but by simply using the router’s Restore Factory Defaults option. OK, that should not work as I have modified each setting at one point or another. Nearly all of the routers functions were set back to the default in my experimentation; all the functions that should matter anyway.

So I go ahead and use the Restore Factory Defaults option, and promptly lose connection to the Internet. That’s NOT helpful. But because I’ve been experimenting, re-establishing the connection to the Internet doesn’t take long. Then I go back into the routers settings and glance at the DHCP clients table.

WTF! There’s a Wii that wasn’t there before!

Going back to the Wii console, I once again run the connection option and damned if it didn’t connect straight away. It didn’t even blink when I later renamed the SSID broadcast (then turned it off altogether), turned on the encryption, and used the filter MAC option.

So bottom line is if you’ve tried everything else, just restore the factory defaults. Can’t be any more work then what you’ve been doing right? (more…)