What's it all about, Alfie?

Today a friend came to Naperville to walk around and see the town. It was fun because we got to go to Eggs, Inc. for a really nice breakfast, and their omelettes are really quite good. Then we just walked around, talking about the town and a lot of nothing. We stopped at Einstein Bros. Bagels and sat in the outdoor area - it was nice. Chatted about college, decisions, things.

Walked into a new outfitting shop next to Barnes and Noble, first time for me, and it was a lot like REI. Interesting. Fun to see things. We walked around more... down on the Riverwalk, and then up through the park. It was a nice time.

After that, we went to Home Depot and picked out some flowers and things for their patio. It was fun talking about planting, how many, what colors. It was just plain fun.

I had forgotten what fun with another person felt like. Bittersweet in many ways.

I've finally decided that I've had enough with the sad state of my wireless networking. To be honest, the wired networking is going pretty well. I've got the best DOCSIS-based Comcast service (75Mbps) and I'm on the list for the 1Gbps. I've thought about the 2Gbps fibre, but that seems like a steep $300/mo for the service. I'd really like to see what 1Gbps works like, so we should be able to see later this year.

Anyway, the service is not all bad. It comes into their modem/router/hotspot, and then out the back of that I had an older WiFi Router that just kept giving me issues. Sure, it was 3 yrs old, but it shouldn't have had that hard a life - but it's just not that reliable. And the coverage in my bedroom is really pretty disappointing.

So it was time to upgrade. But to what?

I looked at a lot of the "Best of" lists, and they were all nice, and then I read another review saying why folks might want to buy Apple's AirPort Extreme networking - configuration simplicity. And he was right.

Yes, their network equipment is not the best price/performance of all the routers out there. But face it - it's Apple - so it's going to be easy to configure... easy to monitor... easy to upgrade... all the things that I've not done a lot of with my old router because it's just not that simple. Sure... I know how to do it, but it's not as clean and easy as Apple's work.

So I went to the local Apple Store, and got a 3TB Time Capsule, and an AirPort Extreme for the bedroom, and set down to setting them up. What an amazing experience!

The Time Capsule properly detected that the Comcast router did NAT, so it didn't set that up. It also picked everything up for nice defaults. All told - it was a few minutes on my laptop, and it was very easy. The AirPort Extreme was just as easy. It detected the Time Capsule and suggested a bridge, and it worked perfectly! Just as simple as could be.

This is why I got the Apple equipment. I can look at things from my iPhone, monitor things, update code... it's simple. It's powerful. And it works like a champ.

Fantastic.