Saying “Elmo wants wifi networking” in sign language
So I have a daughter who is just over two years old. I know, not really germane information for a corporate tech blog but bear with me. In order to get the real story I have to tell a story that leads up to a story that turns into the real story.
Anyhow, being two years old means that formalized communication is a bit of a mixed bag. There are of ton of individual words that are oftentimes oddly annunciated, sometimes strung together as sentences and nearly always mixed together with pieces of American Sign Language. (When she was little we started using sign language with her as a bit of an experiment, it turns out she took to it like a fish to water. In fact, her sign vocabulary has eclipsed mine and she’s giving my wife a run for her money.)
The other day we were sitting on the couch and she turned to me and “said”:
“Ice cream” in sign language
“Me” in sign language
“Farm” in sign language
“Brown” in sign language
“Nana Papa” in spoken English
“Papa” in spoken English
“Num” in spoken English
To translate, that means she wanted to go for ice cream at a place called Farmer Brown’s with my mom and dad while having my dad pay for it. Oh, and that it tastes good.
All right, so that’s back-story #1, which is her giving a recap of back-story #2. What happened was that we went to visit my parents for an early Christmas since my brother was going to be in town from New York. Now, my parents live in the middle of nowhere. They don’t even live in a small town, it is just a normal house that sits on a few acres that is surrounded by farmland. Not far away though is a farm that is owned, as you might guess, by a guy named Brown. Now, apparently during fair season he would supplement his income by making a special sandwich, called self-promotingly a “Farmer Brown,” and sell it at a fair booth.
For the curious a “Farmer Brown” sandwich is beef with mushrooms, a special secret mayonnaise like sauce and probably some other stuff. It is fairly messy but super crazy fantastically tasty.
I guess that the sandwich was so popular that he ended up building a restaurant on his farm, again called Farmer Brown, specifically to sell these things. It was here that we went for lunch and my daughter talked my dad into buying her ice cream as a treat because he’s a complete pushover when it comes to the cute, little granddaughter.
See, back-story #2 done and you’re still with me. Take a moment to congratulate yourself, really, I’m proud of you. You just slogged through 500 words that could have been summed up like this:
My dad is a pushover for his granddaughter.
But, brevity isn’t too interesting and I don’t have an editor watching my word count so we’ll march on.
At dad’s house in the middle of nowhere the way he gets high-speed internet is through this wireless thingamajig that is installed in his attic that runs an Ethernet cable down to his computer. What this allows him to do is stream flash games from the Sesame Street website, a fact not lost on the granddaughter. This last time we were there he had also invested in a wireless router so that my brother and I could connect via our laptops, which I suspect is less of a gesture for our comfort but more of a strategic move to make sure his computer is always free in case the urge to play Elmo’s Keyboard-a-rama hits.
The problem we ran into was that my brother’s Windows XP notebook wasn’t routing traffic correctly to the internet while my Mac was cruising along just fine. It turns out that we tracked down the issue to him having an IP address populated in his wireless card’s gateway field, EVEN THOUGH THE FIELD DISABLED. So while DHCP was working fine and giving him the correct IP address the gateway was being overwritten by an old value that was in a disabled field. Once we cleared that out, after about twenty minutes of head scratching, things worked fine.
My dad and brother both asked why a disabled field like that would still work and I admitted that I had no earthly idea. I probably said something about a troll living inside his computer.
In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a troll. I’ll bet it was a Grouch.