Life at 36

Crazy hot today; my widget weather report says today is 36C (97F). Yeah, and it's only May. The A/C in this apartment are operable by remote only, and we can't find the remotes ... so we are at the complete mercy of open windows for outside breezes, and two circulating fans in the place. Was going to go apartment hunting, but thought it better to stay indoors and catch up on various emails and news. (I have an appointment to check a place out at 6:30pm tonight, when hopefully we won't be at the highs of the day.)

I'm back to praying to the wireless gods again, which is a term my friend KC coined. It's a condition where, for me, I have to stand by the window with my laptop held up shoulder-height, typing with one hand and balancing my precious beast on the other ... in order to maintain good reception to somebody's unsecured wireless broadband internet connection. It's a tiring position to be in, let me tell you. So I now treat it almost as if it were dial-up: I do my praying, sync all my emails, read the RSS headlines and bring up the pages I want to read, pull up the webpages I need, and then return to the comfort of a seat and table to read/work offline. Once I'm ready to post a blog entry (like now), have a queue of emails to send, or need the "next" pages of an article, I make another offering to the gods. And the cycle continues.

One of the goodies I bought over there and brought over here was my new Linksys WRT54G wireless router. I was hoping to hack it and use it as a repeater, and put it by the window to repeat a wireless signal into the rest of this apartment. But it doesn't seem that aftermarket firmwares will work for repeating signals from other companies' routers (since I don't know what kind of hardware those guys have). Ah, well. I suppose it can wait until I move into my own place and get my own legitimate connection. Soon, I hope.

Oh yeah, and my glasses are broken, and very likely irrepairable. So far, I'm impressed that I can actually spend this much time reading and typing with my contacts in (because of the astigmatism), but it's working out alright. And at least I get to rock my Oakley Pennies.