3 May 2012  Waterloo, Little Big Horn, Link-sys.

          What do they have in common?  Someone suffered a humiliating defeat in each instance. 

          I’ve spent the better part of three days this week trying to coax productive, effective functionality from a wireless router that is failing rapidly.  The various fixes that I have applied, while talking to support persons at some Philippine Islands call center, have each failed within a short span of time.  This leaves us surrounded (the comparison becomes more clear) by electronic devises that no longer serve us.  Instead, they jeer and obstruct; treating us like an occupying force to be resisted at every opportunity.  While Afghanistan may be the graveyard of empires, Chuckey, with its frequent power and cable outages, may well be the graveyard of aged electronic devices. 

          The wireless router dropped out of use this morning.  The driver replacement it needed two days ago move along to make room for the firmware update that needed to be performed today – and most likely needed to be performed two days ago. 

          We see the writing on the side of the mountain.  We will be obtaining a new router and rebuilding our network yet again.  The network that has been viable since 2004 has been rebuilt 6 times this week and will be rebuilt at least once more before this route is written into the history blogs. 

          Cue “Bonaparte’s Retreat.”