nancynall.com » Take it and run.
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Take it and run.

Well. I think you should know I just wrote and ash­canned a lengthy post on a sub­ject about which I can sum­mon a great deal of petu­lant snark. Read­ing it over, it occurred to me that:

1) I felt bet­ter just hav­ing writ­ten it down, like the ther­a­pists say, and;

2) I need to grow up. I’ve been invited to write a short essay on a topic I enjoy for a new venue, and it’s some­thing I ought to be devot­ing my time to. Also, I need to strip a wall­pa­per bor­der. Both seem like a bet­ter use of my time.

So.

I’m open­ing the floor to com­ments on two sub­jects. Peo­ple keep telling me my read­ers are smarter than I am, so it’s time to prove it. I want expert opin­ions on two ques­tions.

First ques­tion: Can wi-fi wear out? I’ve been hav­ing a prob­lem with our wi-fi net­work and my lap­top. The sig­nal dwin­dles, fades and drops out entirely, then roars back at full strength and imme­di­ately drops again. This hap­pens inter­mit­tently. Trouble-shooting the prob­lem, I find it’s only hap­pen­ing to me, with my G4 Power­Book. Alan’s some­what newer (by eight months or so) iBook, with its plas­tic case and far less pun­ish­ing use sched­ule, is not hav­ing prob­lems. I know that the aluminum-case lap­tops gen­er­ally are less sen­si­tive than the plas­tic ones, but I’m befud­dled. What could be hap­pen­ing here?

(If it mat­ters, last night I had a close call with my lap­top, a strange sort of e-mail crash that neces­si­tated a restart-from-DVD and other scary stuff. If it were an ER episode, it would have ended with the patient smil­ing but a defib­ril­la­tor would have been involved, too.)

Sec­ond ques­tion: Cash­mere — what the hell? Every girl knows that cash­mere is every­where these days and never more afford­able. What once used to be a $400 sweater can now be had for around $80, if you’re not picky about labels. I bought one of these sweaters three years ago, at a Loehmann’s-type shop in Toronto. I love it and wear it con­stantly. (Kate loves it, too, because it’s soft and it encour­ages snug­gling. What mommy doesn’t love her lit­tle girl coo­ing against her ribcage?) But. In the last year it has started to pill. Pill! I hate pilling. It’s the surest sign of cheap clothes, and it’s some­thing I thought cash­mere was never, ever sup­posed to do. I’m begin­ning to think some angora is involved here. Some­one who knows wool, please solve this mys­tery.

And finally, another huge thank-you to Mindy for turn­ing me on to the Zip-It, despite my ear­lier prob­lem. We had a slow-running shower drain the other day. Water was still stand­ing when I stuck the toothy shaft of the Zip-It down the drain. With no effort what­so­ever, I pulled out…a hair clog the approx­i­mate length and girth of a gym sock. The stand­ing water went out so fast it left skid marks, and with a great, sat­is­fy­ing suck­ing sound, just like Ross Perot promised.

I threw the whole thing away and told Alan the happy news: The drain snake could stay in its lair for a while. “But I’m throw­ing the Zip-It away, too,” I said. “We can buy another.”

“Why?” he said. “You can use it again.” I should say at this point that I was talk­ing to his back; he was work­ing on his com­puter.

“OK, you clean it off, then,” I said, hold­ing up the whole dis­gust­ing mess, now encased in a clear plas­tic news­pa­per bag.

We decided spend­ing $3 for another was a bar­gain after all.

Posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 10:52 am in Same ol' same ol'. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


11 responses to
“Take it and run.”

  1. Jennifer said on September 28th, 2006 at 11:43 am

    The qual­ity of cash­mere can depend on the length of the cash­mere fiber. The longer the fiber, the less pilling you will have and the more you will pay.

  2. Rory on Lawn Guyland said on September 28th, 2006 at 11:47 am

    Nance: If you (or any­one) is using a wire­less house phone near your wire­less modem, that’s your prob­lem. On the rare days I work from home (in the base­ment office) if my wife uses the wire­less (not cell) phone in the den one floor above, the Pow­er­Mac freezes, and won’t budge until she hangs up. She did it once while I was upload­ing pages to my new blog (Funny Stuff at http://​short​takes​blog​.brandweek​.com) and the thing FROZE! Panic ensued until I asked (OK, told) her to hang up! She did, every­thing started movin’, and all was well again. Which is why I rarely work from home. –Rory

  3. mouse's moom said on September 28th, 2006 at 12:28 pm

    We had that prob­lem with the cord­less phone a few years ago when we first got wire­less. We bought a new phone that oper­ated on a dif­fer­ent fre­quency (I don’t know much about the tech details here) and haven’t had it since.

    I’m using a pretty old 12″ power­book and I also have some occa­sional dif­fi­cul­ties with wire­less sig­nals. It feels like it’s just get­ting old and tired like all the rest of us but a cer­tain tech guy we both know says it’s due to DNS con­flicts and other lit­tle prob­lems. In gen­eral, the darn thing is old, heav­ily used, full of all kinds of junk, and has a whole bunch of user accounts and net­work loca­tions.

    I haven’t had any crashes *that* scary yet and I’m hop­ing it holds out until the tuition pay­ments are a lit­tle closer to done and/or I become gain­fully employed again.

  4. nancy said on September 28th, 2006 at 12:48 pm

    I don’t think the phone is the prob­lem. The last time it popped up, we were both online, sit­ting within eight feet of one another on our two lap­tops — this is the new Ward-and-June at home on the couch model — and I had the prob­lem and Alan didn’t. And no one was on the phone.

    And Jen­nifer, that makes sense about the yarn fibers. No more dis­count cash­mere for me.

  5. Jessica said on September 28th, 2006 at 1:11 pm

    Other stuff can inter­fere. Your moth­er­board may not be seated prop­erly any more. Wierd USB things can get in the way.

    Take the ‘book in for ser­vice and get it cleaned.

  6. Jay Small said on September 28th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

    Hi Nancy and Alan!

    On your WiFi, the short answer is, yeah, at its heart it’s a radio and radio trans­ceivers can become less reli­able over time. I had a wire­less router grad­u­ally lose effec­tive­ness, mak­ing the ‘put­ers in our house drop sig­nals a lot more often. The router maker, to its credit, just gave me a new one and the rep said, to Gumpian effect, “these things hap­pen.”

    I also had prob­lems once with com­pat­i­bil­ity of an Apple Air­Port Extreme card (designed for 802.11g stan­dard) run­ning on an older WiFi net­work (designed for 802.11b stan­dard). Your symp­toms sound sim­i­lar, so that’s some­thing to check out at your near­est Apple Genius Bar.

    One thing to try, on your router and then on your lap­tops (if they don’t auto-detect this): change the WiFi chan­nel. Most routers default to chan­nel 6 (I think) but you have sev­eral to choose from. If phones or neigh­bors’ WiFi or reflec­tions from car­rier pigeons’ leg-bands are caus­ing inter­fer­ence, this may help.

  7. brian stouder said on September 28th, 2006 at 1:39 pm

    well, read­ing tech-talk leads me to offer Two Cheers for ‘petu­lant snark’! ….but what­ever.

    (and besides – these days Keith Olber­mann seems to have the mar­ket for self right­eous and petu­lant snark well & truly cor­nered, nowa­days)

  8. ashley said on September 28th, 2006 at 4:53 pm

    If you’re using an Air­Port base sta­tion, it is prob­a­bly on chan­nel 1 (linksys defaults to 6). Maybe try chang­ing the chan­nel.

    Also, my G4 TiBook recep­tion was crappy com­pared to my wife’s iBook. The plas­tic is just more trans­par­ent.

    Along the lines of what Jay said, check out your Air­Port setup util­ity. You have 3 options: 802.11b only, 802.11g only, and both. If you have extreme cards in all your note­books, go for the 802.11g only option…that helped us out a bit.

    And the main prob­lem is prob­a­bly all the other radio traf­fic in your neigh­bor­hood. My Air­Port recep­tion was won­der­ful in New Orleans in Novem­ber, when I was one of 4 peo­ple on my block. Now, with the damned stu­dents ™ around, it’s less than won­der­ful.

  9. Cathy said on September 28th, 2006 at 7:40 pm

    As to the cash­mere pilling prob­lem, Jen­nifer is right about the length of the fiber con­tribut­ing to “pil­lage” although there are other fac­tors such as the amount of twist when the yarn is spun, loose­ness of the knit, num­ber of plys and so on. Yarn with a tighter spin and more tightly knit gar­ments are less likely to pill.

    With cash­mere, shorter fibers are typ­i­cally cheaper. With other fibers, such as wool, the length of the fiber depends on the vari­ety of sheep, where on the body the wool is shorn from, etc… So, pilling is not nec­es­sar­ily indica­tive of an inex­pen­sive gar­ment.

  10. Marcia said on September 29th, 2006 at 8:27 am

    I’ve got no advice. I just think your read­ers should mutiny until we are pro­vided the ash-canned snark.

  11. John said on September 29th, 2006 at 8:35 am

    A reader revolt? Hmmmm….maybe if Mar­cia leads us. Revolts only work if you have really slo­gans or march­ing songs. Just car­ry­ing lit­tle red books and wear­ing uni­sex clothes doesn’t cut it for me.

    BTW…I pre­sume that Mar­cia used a model’s photo for her blog as that gor­geous woman can’t pos­si­ble be the mother of teenagers.

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