Generally, I have to learn tech stuff by trial and error. Somehow, simply observing someone else do it isn't enough to imprint the task into my long term memory. I have to go through the torture and embarassment of "figuring it out myself" for anything to make a dent.
So I'm at Champps in Lombard after the funeral last weekend and I want to try to connect wireless. I open the wireless box and have it search for a connection. Nothing. I try switching a few of the advanced options. Again, nothing. I ask a friend, Byron, to come over and look at it, since his laptop seems to work fine in there. He mucks around for a while, but can't get it to go. So we rope in the bar manager. He knows more than either of us, and is even running mysterious lists in DOS to check drivers. Still nothing. His prognosis is that I must not have installed the driver (when I bought the notebook I wiped the XP Home and installed XP Pro, as it's got fewer bugs). That made sense, so this week I located the driver disc and reinstalled it.
So I get to the hotel and try to hook up (okay that sounds bad). Still nothing.
The "no connection" message has a bit in it about whether my wireless switch is on. Last week, I'd searched the help menus and the internet to see if this was some additional settings I needed to tweak in order to have it work, but couldn't find anything. So today I'm staring at the keyboard, and I notice a little button on top marked "wireless."
Yup.
I'd almost hoped it would just pull up the same dialogue box, so I wouldn't look quite so much like an idiot. But, no, a simple push of the button and wireless is working fine now. Though the Marriott is insane if they think I'll pay $10 per day for something I can get free in half the bars and coffee shops in Kansas City.
(Yes, that's wide open, Ellen-Not-the-Moonbat. I left it as a present just for you. Have fun with the comments.)
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