airport and airtunes crazy

i’ve continued cleaning up and sanitizing my cubicle at work. i replaced my name on the nameplate on my cube with my employee id. (i’ll refrain from explaining hopefully obvious implications.) humorously, over the next couple of hours i had numerous people coming by and showing it to people. they all seemed to like it. i guess maybe there is some general dissatisfaction at work. (or maybe they all just like seeing someone else doing something like that.) i heard some other people were going to be talked to about spending too much time away from their cubes/workspace. and i think they did. but then an email was sent out to my whole group that said we had so many projects and so much work that we all needed to limit our personal breaks to two 10 minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. not surprisingly, that went over like a pumped up, contentious steve ballmer at a linux convention. in fact, i think that may have gone too far. i think a lot of others thought so too. we shall see what happens.
friday night i went to blanco’s to see dale watson. unfortunately, i just wasn’t really into it. i stayed for a couple of hours. when the band took a break, i went outside and smoked my pipe. the band started playing again, but after i finished my pipe i just went ahead and left. i went by taco cabana and picked up some food, then came home and watched the last episode of season two of “dead like me”. (do you put tv shows in quotes or underline them? i don’t remember. oh well, whatever. screw nit-picky grammatical rules.) the hot russian chick at work let me borrow seasons one and two of the show because she really liked the series, so i just finished watching them all. i think it was a good series, but not phenomenal or anything. she also recently loaned me the firefly dvd boxset, so i guess i’ll start watching those soon.
i spent most of saturday with the potts. i ate brunch with them at ihop, went to the bohemian photography loft for a couple of hours, then took sue to the apple store because her iphone had developed this annoying trait of echoing back to people calling her everything they were saying. (a software reload of the phone fixed it.) i agreed to take her to the apple store because i was thinking about buying some stuff. i had some money from various holidays and such, plus the money from selling my laptop. i was originally going to buy a time capsule, but i asked a person there if there was any benefit or features to the time capsule versus an extreme with a usb-attached drive and he said “no.” i was in the process of talking myself out of buying anything at all, but then sue asked me what i wanted and why and how much it cost and said i should just buy it. so i bought an airport extreme 802.11n and an airport express 802.11n. from the apple store i took sue back home, and i hung out and ate supper with them.
when i got home last night i broke out my new toys and started configuring them. i successfully managed to replace my old linksys wrt54g with the extreme, and i managed to get the new express set up and working. i was having some problems figuring out how to get the old 802.11g express to work, so eventually i gave up and went and read crime and punishment.
today i went back to it and figured out the issue with the g express. the airport utility makes it look/sound like when you tell the express to join a wireless network it should show up in the drop-down list, and if it doesn’t you need to make sure the wireless network is turned on and functioning properly. i never could get my wireless network to show up in the list. in fact, nothing showed up. (unless i had the g set up to create a wireless network, in which case it showed itself in the list.) i thought maybe it was a n vs. g thing and kept trying to change configurations and all kinds of junk to get the wireless network to show up in the list. eventually at some point i realized you could just type it in by hand and ignore the empty list. *sigh* it worked. i then spent an hour or something looking for an 8 ft or longer 1/8″ male stereo to 1/8″ male stereo cable. i was sure i had one somewhere, but i never found it.
so i called my grandmother, then went and ate at goode company bbq. from there i went by radio shack, figuring that would be a good place to get a long cable. nope. 3 ft and 6 ft. *sigh* from looking through all my cables earlier, i remembered i had a couple of 1/8″ stereo to rca cables, so i instead bought a pair of female-to-female rca couplers. i came home and put it all together. and it’s all set up and working now.
so what did i get for all of my troubles? the ability to play itunes on my computer, my home stereo, and the speakers on the front porch — all at the same time. of course, i also got two 802.11n devices, but since my old express is g it sort of defeats some of that. but my macbook air is 802.11n also, so i now have the ability to be all 802.11n at some point in the future. oh yeah, and i got gigabit ethernet connections. and a pretty much all-apple network. steve jobs would be proud.