Damn. No new car for me in the near future.

They are starting on the electrical now in the new addition. It's going to a severely odd house. The right half will be wired to the hilt, with cat-5, audio cables, etc. running every which way. The left side won't even have grounded power. The right side will have can lighting in the ceiling, accent lighting on the walls. The left side will be dismally dark as always.

We asked for an estimate for a somewhat bigger deck, and he came back with something taking half our back yard, and costing only a little less than a mid-size car. He's good, but sometimes I think too enthusiastic to do everything top-end.

I fixed his wireless for him last night, so know he owes me favors. (I used the highly complicated "reboot the access point" method to repair it.)

It's always facinating to play with computers used by the less technical. Invariably the hot graphics card is set to 1024x768 mode. (I confused my FiL utterly by changing his to 1280x1024...he wanted to know how I changed the font.) Seriously, most people don't want a computer. They want a WebTV with good graphics.

(Reminds me of a stupid story: a decade or so ago, my father accused me of putting a virus on his Mac after my brother set it to 256 colors for a game. Not to my face, of course.)

Anyway, I also spent a little time explaining how logging out of their Yahoo homepage had nothing to do with people snarfing their wireless. What's stupid is that this stuff isn't really that complicated. It's that most of the "easy" services make it easy by hiding all the stuff you need to know.

I was a bit embarassed the other day when my stepfather asked for recommendations on good website hosting. I was embarassed because I had to admit that, well, I really had no clue because my method, some guy I know and raw HTML, wasn't going to work for him. This happens to me a lot...relatives ask "how do you do that?" and my only response is to babble something about mod_python and linux boxes.

The other day, the FoML wanted me to give him something up high, but I was too slow for him. He looks at me and says, "I'm going to count to three....1.....2.....3!"