Adventures in IT

I've grown to hate IT stuff. My interest in computers started to deteriorate right about the time PC's became common place while in college, because already at that point you mostly spent time just getting them to work right.

Aside from my odd random shut down problem on my laptop, which has gone away, I can't say that I've had any real IT challenges since drinking the Kool-Aid hardcore. Apple shit just works most of the time.

Last night's two-hours on the phone with Time-Warner, as I mentioned, eventually led me to a guy who had a clue and theorized my router may be slowly dying. That router is "on the outside" because it's also a Vonage router, and therefore my phone line. I know that having a land line (if you can even call it that) is rather passe, but I have that phone number in a lot of places and now and then I do use it either to talk to my mom or record for the podcast. It's $15, and the business pays for it, so whatever.

I bought the Apple router because a guy at work said he was floored at how solid it was in terms of signal strength and UI for the client app. Sure enough, it's pretty sweet. What I liked about it was that the MAC filtering was perfectly logical and everything made sense. I wanted to put my Linksys/Vonage router behind it since it may be failing, and once I learned what ports Vongage was using, it was a piece of cake to put it in the DMZ and expose it to the world. The phone works. Probably not a big deal to the average network monkey, but I was happy to figure it out.

I have another problem though that's getting on my nerves. My printer, an HP 2550Ln, around three years old I think, is starting to misfeed paper so the alignment is totally f'd up. Seeing as how I print CB club cards on it, that's a real problem. I can't even do return address labels because they won't print right.

I'm not sure what I should do about the printer situation. The last thing I want to do is replace it because few big-ticket things are more uninteresting to buy than printers. Not to mention I can stand the idea of that thing ending up in a landfill. I'm open to suggestions.