Mollie and I had agreed that we would wait to turn my home office into the guest bedroom/nursery to be until we reached the DTC milestone in the adoption. Now that we have, it was time for her to get started on transforming the room.

Of course, the first step was to get me out of there into what was then the guest bedroom. We took time planning how the office would look, what paint to put on the walls, how to arrange the furniture. We emptied the room, made a mess of the rest of the house and started applying primer on Friday. By Saturday, the room was painted (that's after spending a lot of time running around town and going to the CCAI picnic). On Sunday, we started moving furniture.

Of course, we quickly realized that my original plan wouldn't quite work. My desk was bigger than I thought it would be. As a result, the positioning of the furniture changed. Once the furniture was in place, it was time to reassemble the computers and network. That alone took a few hours since I made an effort to organize the cabling so it wouldn't turn into another rat's nest.

I think that the end result was well worth the effort. The last thing to do is to hang the frames back on the walls and organize my library so I can find my books again.

It's looking like I killed yet another Linksys WRT54G. A few days ago, I started noticing a severe slowdown when browsing to the internet or receiving and sending emails. I started iStumbler to see what might be happening. I noticed that there were some large gaps without seeing any transmissions from the downstairs access point. Pinging it also showed some wild variations in the ping response time with some significant packet loss. Thankfully, the upstairs access point kept me connected and even allowed the VPN to maintain a connection. It was time to upgrade.

A while back, I chose not to run wires in my house and went with the WDS route to bridge between the network downstairs (which supports a TiVO, the MCI VoIP adapter and the cable modem) and my office (which has my mail server, printer and a few other computers). I really couldn't afford too much downtime since I normally work from home.

Initially, I used a WRT54G as my main access point/router, and a WAP54G as the upstairs access point. I had updated the firmware on the WRT54G to support WDS (using Sveasoft at first and then using DD-WRT). Configuring the main router for WDS wasn't too bad, but I was limited to WEP for encryption purposes. This in itself was a little worrisome considering how easy it is to break WEP.

Eventually, the WAP54G died, and I decided to use the Apple Airport Express access point that I normally carried with me (never know when I might have to setup a wireless network in a conference room.) I did get it to work using the WRT54G as the main station, but it wasn't straightforward and I was still limited to WEP encryption.

So I took the opportunity to get a second Apple Airport Express access point and configure it to be the main station and to use WPA2 Personal as the encryption protocol. I used the Apple Airport Admin utility to add the existing one as a remote station (after resetting it to factory defaults). Once I chose to update the configuration on the new Airport Express, the utility also configured the office Airport Express to act as a remote station. Automatically. With no fiddling or confusion on my part. Even better, everything seems to be going faster and be more responsive. This was certainly well worth the money.