what happened yesterday

so yesterday was an interesting day all in all. i awoke with the intent of accomplishing amazing things. alas, that was not to be.

i started running errands around noon. i made it to the bank and took care of my business there. when i got in the blazer (see earlier posts about new vehicles in sept.-oct. '05), and put the transmission in reverse, there was a little bit of a squeaking noise and no backward motion. so i pop the hood check the tranny fluid. i've seen the situation where the fluid was low and the tranny wouldn't "catch" (for lack of a better word). so i push it out of the spot and go to the walmart. i get tranny fluid and dump almost the whole quart in. no nothin'.

so i get it home. get it pushed into the spot. at this point, forward has worked, but is acting a little flakier. drive/overdrive is getting slower. so i start making calls. transmissions repairs were discussed. the prices range on the order of 1e3 to 2e3. i.e., way too much.

well i go upstairs to grab the laptop which i have checked out from ncsu. it's an older laptop but i got it for free as long as i want it. it was beautiful yesterday, about 80, so i decide i'm going to go outside to work. the battery light now blinks in a 4-short-red then a 1-long-green pattern. apparently this means the battery is dead. unplugging the laptop results in a certain death. so now i have two options. everytime i want to go somewhere, i can enjoy the smallness of the lappy, but not it's portability. i can still plug it up and use it on the deck or anywhere else there is a receptacle. i can turn it back in and just use my desktop. or...i had a better idea (this is the one you should endorse). since the wireless nic is so much more stable than the one on my desktop, i considered making it a wireless gateway to my old wireless router. then turning off the wireless on the old router and running a cat5 cable to my desktop might alleviate some of the frustration of ndiswrapper in linux. :-)

today i work.