I like Sonars. I like computers. I like science. I'm a geek

Grrr….I’m having all sorts of problems connecting to wireless in Fredericton.  I have my eee 1000HE netbook with me, and I am having a hard time connecting to wireless routers anywhere, even when sitting at my parents’ house, right beside their router!  It worked yesterday, and then got more and more flaky.  My iPhone can see wireless just fine.

I can see the wireless networks come up up in the taskbar at the top of the screen, and they are showing various levels connectivity, looking pretty normal, really.  But when I try to select on of them, it sits there and thinks about it forever with the spinner going, and then just tells me that the wireless network is disconnected.  Then if I actually do manage to connect, it’s just really really slooooowwww.

I wondered if I had done something wonky to my settings in Ubuntu, so I tried booting Moblin from my USB flash drive.  It did the same thing.    So is there something wrong with my hardware?  I don’t remember ever having so many problems with wireless.  I couldn’t even upload a single picture to Facebook because it would just times out!  It’s all very frustrating.  I should note that if I’m plugged into a wired network, it’s all fine.  Slow, but at least it works reliably.

I’m sitting at Read’s coffee shop/bookstore downtown, and I’m able to connect to the Fred e-zone, but it’s only showing between 2-15% at any point in time.

Well, there’s my rant for today.  I don’t rant very often, but I’m just not sure what else to try, and it’s very frustrating.   Maybe my netbook just doesn’t like Canadian wireless?

Maybe I just need to calm down, put my netbook away, drink a few glasses of mulled wine and enjoy the snowy beauty of my hometown

Just a quick update – I’ve been running Karmic for about a week now, and I am very happy with it.  It’s working great, running on my EEE 1000HE.  I’m excited to try it out on a ‘real’ computer (not just my wimpy – but awesome – little netbook).  I sort of got swept away by Jolicloud, and its pretty colors.  Oh yeah, and that invite thing always makes things seem that much more special.  Until that part wears off.  Jolicloud is made installing things really easy, but one thing that I started to realise after a while was that a lot of the ‘apps’ in the jolicloud ‘app store’ were actually just websites that were displayed on the desktop using Prism.

I’ve been able to get pretty much everything I want (so far) to run on Karmic, with pretty minimal effort – both Skype and the Flash plugin were really easy.  The Software Center makes installing standard software very straightforward too.