stupid technology

Monday, April 26, 2004, at 12:11PM

By Eric Richardson

My cold beat me up last week, but it's been reduced to an occasional cough now, so I think it's about done. The end of the semester is no time to be sick. 15 more days and I'll be done (well, at least until my summer class starts up mid-June).

When I bought my laptop I also got a Linksys WPC11 pcmcia card for wireless. It was cheap, and people seemed to say it worked with Linux. Of course then I got it, and it turned out to be a version 4 card, which actually doesn't work well with linux at all. I sent it to Linksys, they replaced it with a version 3 card, and all was well.

Until recently.

Recently the card started driving me crazy by fairly frequently losing sync with the network and claiming signal strength was 100%. It would have to be ejected, reinserted, and then the interface re ifup'ed before it would work again. And about every fourth or fifth time it did this it would lock the machine up hard.

Last Tuesday night, after the card had locked the machine for the half-dozenth time that day, I got fed up.

So I threw the card at a wall, and the problems stopped.

Granted, the card also now didn't work. So today I bought a new card, this time a... wait for it... Microsoft MN-520. $29.99 at Circuit City and based on the Prism2 chipset, so it has great Linux support.

My desktop also has a Microsoft wireless IntelliMouse. Hmmmm... My keyboard, though, is still firmly Silicon Graphics.