This story is probably only of value to the nerds in the audience, so consider yourself forewarned.

Sometime last month, the new across-the-hall neighbors installed a wireless network -- a completely unsecured wireless network. With my trusty TiBook sitting idle on the coffee table, I happened to notice that the AirPort icon was all lit up. I tried to get on the Web, with no phone line connected, and it went through lickety split. It was unsecured, it was fast and it was free. And I have no scruples.

Jump forward to a week ago. After a month of wondering when they were going to get wise to both my and Emily's laptops tapping their network all the damn time, the network suddenly stopped working. And this wasn't the sort of momentary outage that happens to every Internet connection, it was down from early afternoon until sometime in the middle of the night. I assumed they'd turned on MAC filtering and our computers could no longer join the network. For the non-nerds out there, every network interface on your computer has a unique address, no matter how or if it is connected to the Internet. Computers can be denied access to a network if they don't have a MAC address that's on the approved list. Faced with this, we decided to just shell out the $30/month for SBC DSL; they had a special going which gives 384Kb-1.5Mb downstream for that price if you sign a year-long contract, which is pretty good.

The next morning, their network came back and I felt kind of dumb, but whatever. It wasn't going to last forever. The really dumb part came today.

I bought Belkin's 802.11g wireless router from Circuit City (I hate, hate, hate Circuit City with the fiery passion of 1,000 newborn suns, but their site gave the impression that they had the best wireless router options) for $60 after rebate and proceeded to get everything put in place. I made sure to turn on MAC filtering so those fiends across the hall couldn't trespass. I dutifully retrieved the MAC addresses from our laptops and entered them in the allowed list, but strangely, a third address appeared out of nowhere. Thinking the router had auto-entered addresses it found floating in the air, I blocked the one I didn't recognize, since it wouldn't allow me to delete it.

After that I couldn't get my blue Power Mac G3 to connect to the network anymore, and I think you see where the story goes now. I had completely overlooked the fact that I needed to allow the wired computer behind the filter as well as the wireless machines. So now everything's running smoothly. I'm supposed to leave the DSL modem running for 10 days to allow to properly calibrate, but I already restarted it several times when I didn't know I'd screwed up the MAC stuff. Oh well. I'm sure this is just the first of many problems.