As some of you know and others don’t, Candice has lately
been staying with me. (If you just fell out of your chair, I’ll
explain, just ask.)

Anyhow, this presented technical problems. I usually just bum around
the house with my laptop, connected via wifi — but one computer doesn’t
cut it for the two of us, especially since we both tend to have
enough to do online that the easiest way to do it is for both of
us to get our work done at the same time. We’ve also got a whole bunch
of IRC friends that we like to check in with, and so forth.

So one laptop wouldn’t cut it. But I try to avoid accumulating computers,
so the only other machine here was my Mac in the spare room which I
use as a home office. Using that would mean that we’d be in different
rooms while we worked, which we didn’t want, and would mean that one
of us would not be in the air-conditioned living room, but in the
warmest room in the apartment.

So we realized we’d have to bring the Mac out to the living room. It
was a tight fit to get its cart down the hall to
the living room but there it is. So we fire it up and then
I remember that wireless ethernet is not just CRAZY MAGIC but
actually requires some hardware. Woops.

I was going to go into work and grab a 50′ ethernet cable, and run that
down the hall into the switch in the server closet, but that’s ugly.
And then I remember that I have one PCMCIA port left on my laptop.
Aha!

So the Mac is now connected to the laptop with a crossover cable, and
the laptop is connected to the firewall with wireless ethernet, and
the laptop routes traffic between the Mac and the firewall, and
Candice and I sit five feet away from each other chatting
on IRC. (Some of my more faithful readers might find that familiar.)

I keep telling her that I’m not a geek, but she doesn’t seem to believe
me.