I think I’m a consultant right now. That’s the only word for it. A small non-profit has hired me for two weeks to help them decide what to do with old computers, set up a network, help them plan a game they’re designing, and automate their backup system.

This temporary position happened to coincide with the host of their external sites, ValueWeb, merging with Hostway and moving their servers to a different city… and they claimed the machines would only be down 12-15 hours. It turned out to be over 3 days with no external site or company e-mail, but what’s the difference, really? I’m glad I’m not hosting a business with them, I’ll say that much.

While some of it’s frustrating at times, I’m getting to muck around with Applescript. Oh, and it pays the rent too!

My new Comcast internet connection has been tremendously frustrating so far, but now everything is working and I am happily posting from my own wireless.

The initial problem is that you have to activate your Comcast service with a PC (and not a Mac or anything else) connected directly to your modem. This registers the MAC address of your modem with Comcast. It also registers the address of the PC, meaning that any other device hooked up to the modem is refused a connection. My Airport Extreme, sadly, wasn’t terribly extreme with no internet connection.

I researched my problem online for a while, growing increasingly frustrated when it seemed I would have to buy a new router to satisfy my new ISP Overlord. The solution I saw repeated was using the router to spoof the MAC address of the original PC. While this is a fine and respectably geeky way to solve the problem, I’d rather not buy a new router.

It turns out I had neglected a chief rule of tech support: Restart the thing. Another site I found declared that the PC’s MAC address is only registered in the Cable Modem, not at Comcast. A hard reset of the modem opens it up to latch on to a new device, in this case my Airport Extreme. Everything is working nicely now, and I didn’t even have to deal with customer service!

Since I’ve not seen this solution anywhere else (maybe because it’s crazy), I ought to put it out there.

The background of this workaround is that in my apartment, I am granted free internet usage by the University of Denver. This comes with the condition that I have to use Cisco’s lovely VPN client at all times to get a connection. This is on my Macs and PC’s, even those with built-in VPN capability. Since the VPN client must be running to get any internet connection at all, devices like the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, and what have you, cannot get online on the University wireless.

At least, not without a little help.

My first thought was just to use Nintendo’s WFC dongle, essentially a Nintendo-only USB device that creates a local wireless network to connect to Nintendo’s servers. That was no good. Both the Nintendo WFC Connector and the Cisco VPN client require the sharing of a network connection on your machine. I’m not sure about Macs (WFC Connector is PC only), but on Windows you can only have one shared connection at a time. I had a crazy idea, though. And it worked.

My setup to get my Wii online now works as follows: On my PowerMac G5, I run Windows XP at absolute minimal settings in a Virtual PC. The Virtual PC leeches internet connectivity from the Mac, but the connection is NAT’d and the VPC believes it’s coming in on an ethernet card. The VPC is more than happy to share this connection with the Nintendo WFC Connector, which is plugged into a hub on top of the G5. This virtualized machine keeps my Nintendo equipment connected for a sliver of the G5′s 2 GB of RAM. It’s not great, but it works, and that’s good enough for me for the time being.

EDIT: After further testing, I’ve determined that this also works with WinXP running a second WinXP install under VMWare Workstation (with WFC software version 1.04 and VMWare Tools installed). I don’t see any reason why Linux couldn’t do the same with its version of VMWare. VirtualPC 2007 on Windows, however, can’t use this trick because it doesn’t support USB.

If an NES game wasn’t working, you pulled it out, blew on it, and stuck it back in, right? Right.

Today I believed the wireless card in my trusty G5 Tower had gone out. Every other computer in my apartment connected beautifully to the network, even my laptop when I sat it on top of the G5. Full bars all around. My old co-worker who is now a Mac Genius™ was online at the time, and he ran me through a few troubleshooting steps. When it was coming down to making an appointment at the Genius Bar, we had the idea to re-seat the chip. He told me where it was and I opened up the box, pulled out the chip, blew on it as NES users learned to do, and put it back in. Closed up the box, booted, full bars ever since. I know the NES blowing technique is largely superstition, but sometimes it really does work. Makes you wonder where else it might work, eh?