Did I really post the previous entry on Thanksgiving? If I'd realized that, I would have wished y'all a happy one in addition to going on about those monitor shutdown programs. I do hope you had a happy holiday, though.

Things have been pretty busy over here -- following the holiday, I spent a great deal of time mucking around with the new router that I bought during the black Friday insanity. Folks who communicate with me in real-time fashion online may have noted that I experienced frequent disconnects with the old router, which apparently sucked as far as routers go, so I picked up a new one in the hopes that it would resolve the difficulty. What I did not know, however, was that despite apparently receiving excellent reviews, the Linksys WRT54G is also sort of crappy because apparently there are eight versions of this thing, which they started downgrading around v5. Mine is a v6 -- a fact that is conveniently not noted anywhere on the packaging and must be determined by an analysis of the serial number. By the time I learned this, naturally, I had already taken the thing out of the packaging and was attempting to set it up.

Despite being a downgraded version, however, the WRT54G v6 -- like its superior brethren -- can be flashed with third party firmware that improves its performance. The process is apparently a bit trickier than it is with the others (or so I have been told; I've never tried flashing the others), but with me being extra impulsive about keeping the thing after staying up all night and standing in 2+ hours' worth of lines to get it, I undertook to do just that. I'll spare you the details regarding the confusion that resulted, but suffice it to say that I finally got the thing up and running with the 3rd party firmware and configured as necessary. The problem with the disconnects has been fixed, and I have probably downloaded like 8+ gigs' worth of stuff since then -- at first just to test whether it was working properly, and then because I happened to find a whole bunch of new stuff that I wanted to watch. Frex, "Jigoku Shoujo" (Hell Girl) and a whole bunch of other anime series. Hurrah.

I'm still oddly dissatisfied, though. Everything is working fine now, but I still have that dissatisfaction that attends having an inferior product -- it's kind of like having your hunger completely satisfied by a tasty seafood enchilada at Chevy's but knowing that you could have gone for a sushi buffet instead. That's a terrible example. It's more like getting a B+ on a final exam when all you needed to do is get a B- to maintain your A grade, but knowing that you could have gotten an A if you'd known that solving the last 10% of the questions on the Calculus test required you to know the names and properties of various flora. Granted, that's some pretty difficult stuff to predict, but you could have found out if you'd done more consulting with people who had taken that instructor's exams before and therefore knew about his unhealthy obsession with flowers. It's more like that, yes.

Also, in case you missed it, I posted a (very late) review and analysis of scary 49¢ Thanksgiving cards over on Scary-Crayon. Feel free to check it out! I suppose that is all for now, then. Ja ne.