It was after only an hour and a half that I got this beautiful screen display from the HP ew5000 digital receiver on my TV. It was three hours later that I was finally able to listen. First, I haven’t used my D-Link DI-614+ wireless 802.11b router for months and it turned out its configuration was fucked so I had to set it up again. Pretty straightforward, but it took me a while to verify a connection with my ThinkPad, which has been hard-wired into the network before today. Neighbors’ routers were giving me bogus connections (if you have a wireless router, be sure to set an admin password, mask your SSID and use 128-bit encryption for your WEP because there are assholes like me out there who will fuck with your settings just for a giggle), but I eventually got hooked up. But then, even though I could see the files on the remote computer (where I have my music and photos), I got an useless “unable to play” error when I punched down on the Fountains of Wayne tracks and none of the photos would display. I wired into the Ethernet port and watched with the video capture card on the remote computer, which by now was right in front of me, but I still couldn’t access any files. I tried sharing the relevant folders, but apparently the included software overrides that. Frightening. More frightening, next time I successfully powered up the ew5000 receiver connected to the TV, it went out and grabbed a firmware update from the Internet and flashed itself even though the procedure at the HP website strongly recommends using only a wired connection to do that. Sunuvabitch just went out to HP all by itself and flashed itself, talk about security worries. Anyway about 10 minutes ‘til 9pm, with a flash macromedia update and server update from HP, I was able to get the files to play. In the meantime, I tortured myself by setting down the remote in nearly impossible places to find so I could walk around looking stupid while I awaited the next test. Could get it to say it was playing, but there was no sound Aha! – I forgot to connect the audio cables to the wireless receiver. I definitely have a Bright Future In Sales – but it’s working now. That’s the ew5000 there atop the TV, just to the left of the robot cat.
9:15:37 PM 
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