nobody asked…

A couple of days back I lamented the technical difficulties that had taken on a life of their own with apparent intent of burying BlogCentral and me along with it. They were solved. Then they weren’t. Then they were fixed. Then they returned. They hovered like a dark cloud over mine head and my cup of frustration runneth over. Yea, verily, they fled like nocturnal predators when sol began his (her?) daily march from horizon to horizon. And therein hides the key to the solution, finding the wooden stake, as it were.

When swapping out computers, I decided to also switch over from Wi-Fi to a powerline networking connection. I had recently done this for a customer and was very impressed with the ease of installation, the improved speed, and security of the connection. It worked right out of the box. Quick security config and I was cooking… That was Saturday. That night, connection disappeared. After fighting it for awhile, I gave up and moved on to less stressful activities. Sunday morning, determined to conquer it, I found that the connection was back. Later in the day, I switched the desk lamp on to make the final change — adding a USB (an USB?) hub that sits on my desk, eliminating the crawling around with the dustbunnies everytime I want to plug in my USB thumb drive. Got that done and — boom — no internet.

Brain cells may at times need some help and coaxing to work together. For me, a nice chardonnay does a credible job as prime mover in an instance like this. So after exhausting all the normal troubleshooting techniques I use daily in my chosen incarceration profession, I sat back with a glass of synaptic lubricant and examined the dilemma from outside the box. Like turning a light on (pun intended) it came to me. My work getting everything working had occurred during the day when there was plenty of natural light streaming through the windows. Disruption of the internet connection was only in the evening or any other time I had the desk lamp on. A quick experiment validated my theory. Something in the high-intensity lamp’s little power transformer must be feeding enough of the wrong kind of garbage back through the powerline to interfere with the signal.

Problem solved. New problem found. Despite the fact that I’m a fairly decent touch typist, I can’t do it so well in the dark. If you encounter any strange spellings or characters floating around on my posts, it probably means I was composing in the dark. Now I’m in the market for a new desk lamp — maybe a nice, simple little incandescent model. And another bottle of chardonnay. Sometimes the problems and solutions are where we least, or last, expect to find them…