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One of the things I miss when I am on my PC instead of my Mac is my dock.  I don’t anymore!

http://rocketdock.com/ 

Since the first day I used spaces I wanted to be able to change the current view with my mouse.  I actually did a little programming work to try create an app that would do that.  So when Chris emailed me and told me about “Warp” it sounded great.  Someone else had the same idea and built the app, so now I don’t have to do all that work!

http://www.ksuther.com/warp/ 

In my neighborhood there is a lot of wireless networking going on. It has the 2.4mhz spectrum so jammed up that I was having a hard time keeping a reliable wireless connection.  I decided that if anyone should be winning the wi-fi war it should be me, so I decided to upgrade to Draft-N and put the issue to rest.

I originally purchased a Dlink extreme Draft-N router, but soon after one of my co-workers showed me a sale on the Airport Extreme Base Station from Apple on BestBuy.com. Since it was only like $30 more than I had paid for the dlink, the idea of wireless hard drive and printing really appealed to me. So I got one, and planned to return the dlink.

I set it up, and everything seemed to be working great. I had really fast connectivity, a solid signal, I thought my wi-fi problems were history. Then I had to connect to VPN to work from my windows XP computer (a standard PPTP type of VPN, nothing to complicated). After being connected for about 30 minutes all communication just stopped. After trying a few things I opted to reboot the router. It came back up and worked for a while. I was even able to do a few VPN sessions. However after a the third connection to m VPN and being online for about 30 minutes the router died again.

So I called Apple. They had never heard of the problem before. They had me try a few settings, none of which helped. I tried for another day or two to play with the settings myself and nothing I did would help. So I bundled it up and took it back to Best Buy. VPN is just way to critical for me to have that kind of problem with it. They may fix this with a firmware release in the future, but I couldn’t wait.

I did like the router. The setup and config is probably the best I have ever seen on a consumer based router. I like that you can have multiple router configs too. I don’t know what I would actually use it for, but I liked the option. They make security a breeze and smooth out the complicated issues quite well. My co-worker loves the wireless printing, which I never got far enough to try, but think that would be nice to have.

So I when I returned the router to Best Buy I went and looked at other routers that had a usb port for an external hard drive. I found the Linksys WRT350N Gigabit Router with Storage Link. I thought this looked promising, so I picked it up and brought it home…..but I will leave that story for another day.