Last week we started driving Karen’s nineteen year old Toyota Corolla (1985) to work, which she acquired just over a week ago. It has been kept in mint condition, and it goes really well; much better than my family’s Hyundai Excel, which is around the same age. Karen’s been taking lessons, so she’ll be driving it herself in no time! Anyway, the Corolla’s steering is way better than our old Hyundai. The gear shift is really smooth. The clutch pedal-arm is very short compared to the Excel’s, which took a little bit of getting used to, but now I think it has a much better feel than the Excel’s. It even has air-con! :) One down side is that it uses LRP, which seems to be about 5c per litre more expensive than unleaded. Of course, there are also fewer LRP pumps at the petrol stations, so you have to hunt around for the right pump. The hand brake also needs to be pulled on really tightly before it holds the car on a slope. That might need looking at. Then again, maybe it’s just me. Needless to say, Karen’s mightily pleased at owning her own car!
Had a lovely BBQ last night. Have to do that again some time.
We installed a 802.11g NIC (Netgear WG311) into Karen’s PC yesterday. Her dad has a wireless ADSL router. Unfortunately, the ADSL only seems to work intermittently, but it works well as a wireless access point. The software that came with the NIC seems a bit flaky, but once I got the card configured, everything worked properly, and I shouldn’t have to use the configuration software again. Her PC is a dual boot system. I upgraded her Red Hat Linux install to Fedora Core 2, and now I’m trying to work out how to configure the NIC under Linux. Most people are reporting that the WG311 works with no glitches under Fedora once you load right driver. Must investigate further. Seeing the ease with which a wireless network operates in a home environment, it is very tempting to convert all our machines at my house to use 802.11. No blue cable everywhere. No drilling holes in the floor whenever you want to connect another box. No having to crawl under the house. It’s also one less cable to yank out of the back of the machine every time I need to move it out from under my desk. The prices for wireless cards are coming down, too. The WG311 cost $66 from Umart.
