I returned from a trip very early this morning. I got back in sometime around 6:30 today. There was considerable delay in Denver thanks to lightning which required a very unpleasant hour and a half on the tarmac. Luckily, I don’t hate flying like my wife does.

That I ever made it to this point was a bit of a miracle. Instead of flying out of RIC as I might have hoped, my flight was out of Dulles. I’ve been to Dulles a couple of times, but always en route to someplace else by airplane. I never really knew where in space this airport was located. I had assumed Washington, DC as it is often referred to Washington Dulles.

Apparently not.

It’s close to Washington, but actually in Virginia about 30 miles west of the capitol. This, probably, is not news to most of you other than myself. So, when I went to get directions to the airport from my house I typed in “Dulles International Airport” and “Washington, DC” in Google Maps and I got directions. Directions that said “To Dulles International Airport.” I’ve double checked the directions a half-dozen times since.

Here’s the thing though: The end result on these driving directions was not Dulles. It was Reagan International Airport. A wholly separate airport with wholly separate flights.

So, I dutifully followed these directions, and drove to the wrong fucking airport. Then I panicked.

Amazingly, thanks to a delayed flight I somehow managed to make it to Dulles, park, pick up my ticket, and make it though security and still make it to my connecting flight on time. I’m still not entirely sure how that happened.

Staci is home again, having escaped the horror of Florida with only a gruesome suntan the record of the terrors she encountered deep down south. I picked her up Monday night from the Richmond airport. I don’t do that much flying myself, so I’m always struck by the strange compression of space and time that occurs therein. Most notably: the choice of stores inside your typical airport. The sheer randomness of commerce — even the presence of commerce sometimes — is peculiar. Magazines, sodas, candy bars, and novels I can understand. It’s all the other random crap that gets me.

I flew into Dulles some time in the fall of 2004. The presidential election was still a few months off, but the name-calling and mockery was in full force. Eager to capitalize on the 5 guys who needed to own a tee shirt with a picture of John Kerry that looked a bit like the mask in the movie Scream some enterprising sorts had set up a kiosk precisely to meet that demand. I’ll bet it works though. In the weird alternate universe of airports worthless crap, shit you’d normally never give a second thought to, probably looks a whole lot more interesting.

I mentioned a while back that I recently came into possession of some new AirPort gear. Installing this new AirPort Extreme required a complete reset of my previous AirPort network. I was using just an AirPort Express to serve delicious, nutritious Internets to our two computers. Now I was to use the Extreme as the primary base station, and the Express as a client. Simple enough to do, and I had no problems to speak of.

No problems at all, until I wanted to print something.

A while back I picked up a HP DeskJet 6840 to replace the hand-me-down printer we had been neglecting. A hallmark of this particular printer is its wireless capabilities, and I was going to be damned if I was going to hook it up by a USB cable if I didn’t have to. Now, by no means would this printer be impaired by installing it by means of a USB cable to the AirPort Express. It has print server capabilities. I have three spare USB cables lying around the house. But, goddamnit! This printer is wireless and I was going to use that function.

I don’t remember exactly how I got it hooked up to the network when we just had the AirPort Express. I do remember being puzzled though. According to the instructions, the 6840 needs to be plugged into an ethernet port as if it were another computer on the network until all the wifi settings are entered. I couldn’t precisely do that with a wireless router lacking both WAN and LAN ports. I fidgeted around with it until it started printing and left it alone.

Now that I had an AirPort Extreme though, I could go through the instructions exactly as written. So I plugged the printer into the LAN port, went through the installation, entered my WPA2 password, unplugged the cable, waited until the little wifi lights came on the front of the printer, and I was ready to go. Aside from one thing, that is: The damned thing wouldn’t print.

It found the network just fine. It connected to the network just fine. It wasn’t the security settings. All of the computers on the network found it by Bonjour as per the instructions. Everything went swimmingly, except when I clicked the print button it just sat there doing nothing in particular. So I went through all the setup again, exactly as written. I set up the whole network again, without WPA. When that didn’t work, I turned it back on again.

Here’s the problem: I followed the instructions. I honestly cannot explain why this might have made a difference, but the problem was somehow related to using the Bonjour printer setup. If I selected the the Deskjet 6800 that appeared automatically as a Bonjour printer in Printer Browser not one single print job I sent would finish. But, if I clicked “More Printers…” at the bottom of that window and set it up via “HP IP Printing” it works consistently and reliably. Weirdness.

All in all, I think the revival is going quite well. I’ve been more consistent with site maintenance the past week than I ever was, even when this was new. I can see that ever more clearly when I was fidgeting with the archive pages — pages which have proven to be more headache than I had anticipated due largely to my lack of insight into how to style them — and I saw more posts in this month than any previous month.

I’m sitting on the couch in the living room next to Milo who is very noisily napping. He’s been terribly congested of late. His breathing has a high-pitched rattle as he dozes in a nest of small blankets and afghans. My cat snores something fierce.

So, I went up to the local Apple store Saturday evening. Though it should have been against my better judgement, I could not pass up some of the deals awaiting me on the refreshed and returned table. I came home with a more or less brand new AirPort Extreme and a set of cables to go along with the AirPort Express we’d been using for a while now. I didn’t really need either one of them, but both were on my vague and tenuous list of things for my fantasy entertainment center. I had anticipated buying first a receiver and some speakers, but I could not escape the sale.

(I really wonder why all of these AirPort devices were on the sale rack. Methinks, perhaps, those rumors of a video version of the AirPort Express might not be so far off the mark. My local Apple Store had 4 AirPort Extremes, 2 AirPort Expresses, and a set of cables on the refreshed table. Now, maybe someone returned all of that, but I kind of feel like it might have been store models. Maybe.)

Not having a stereo at the moment I hooked it up to the television after reconfiguring my stations to talk to one another appropriately. I also realized that the Express will share the connection through the ethernet port on the bottom so I could finally hook up the Playstation 2 and Xbox (now that the new generation is upon us with all its wifi goodness). I thought I was going to have to buy yet another device to get that rocking. I’m really digging the idea of streaming my music from one end of the house to the other. I’m sure much more well equipped households are scoffing at my delay on jumping onto this bandwagon. It was purely a money thing. . . and I really don’t think I ought to be able to buy the rest of the equipment I need but I sure as shit want to real damn bad.