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My eldest son Henry, 3, continues to amaze me.

His mum’s been in hospital on and off (mostly on) over the past two weeks, sometimes both his parents vanishing in the night, he awakes to find his grandmother in charge.

He’s taking it all remarkably well, even if he does come out with some startling things when he’s playing. The other day he was playing with his toy bus and said matter-of-factly “my mum’s dead” - now even I realised this was a slightly worrying remark that needed putting right, so I stopped watching Channel 4 News or preventing his baby brother eating E45 Cream or whatever I was doing and had a good chat with him to make sure he understood his mum wasn’t dead, just not very well.

Tonight I tried to get him to settle down for a story, but he was making up his own story so elaborate and exciting there wasn’t much on our bookshelves to compete. He has a transparent plastic case that he pretended was an aeroplane, he told me where he and all his friends and family were sitting, that we were all going to the seaside on it, everyone gets off except Henry who gets left on board, and it takes off again, Henry parachuting back down to the seaside where daddy says “brave boy, Henry” - the plane then crashes, all the passengers get off alive, but Henry is a cruel author as he killed off the pilots, or the “driver mans” as he calls them. “Driver mans dead. Ambulances and fire engines come. Police knock baddies over”.

Eat lead, Miffy.

Cringely rocks - while googling for stuff on WiFi, I found this column by Robert X Cringely - and if you don’t think that column proves he’s a genius, read the (currently) current one about Apple not buying Universal Music.

The correct way to get broadband

I’d been toying with the idea of getting broadband for ages - a bit pricey at �25 a month, but I thought it would change my life, I’d use the internet more and in new and exciting (maybe even lucrative) ways.

I also wanted to go down the wireless route so I could sit in the garden shed updating my weblog (”The spider has spun a new web on the Nitromors can. Stopped raining. The squirrels are active again…”)

My mate Jon thought I should buy an Airport card for my iBook, plug it in and see what came up - just Jon being funny, I thought, so I ignored him and ordered a broadband package and a wireless router that would act as an ADSL router and WiFi base station all in one - hooked the beloved bondi blue iMac up to the router by ethernet and off I went.

A few weeks later I got my Airport card - the CD-ROM wouldn’t mount on my iBook so I just powered down the computer, slotted it in and powered back on.

The compter said: “Detected new Airport card… use default settings?”

Well, in the absence of any instructions, let’s do that.

And it worked, there I was browsing the web. Had problems with my email but that’s not unusual. Couldn’t connect to the router admin page, and the signal strength was a bit low, but hey, who cares, here I am lying on the sofa, websurfing wirelessly at high speed. Easy. Perhaps too easy, for what’s to stop some warchalkers stealing my costly broadband connection?

Later that night - probably about 4am - I pieced all the clues together and realised that the reason the signal was quite low, and I couldn’t send email and couldn’t see my router’s config web page was - my iBook wasn’t connected to my router at all, it was connected to someone else’s.

I switched my wireless router off at the mains, and sure enough my internet connection remained. Moving round the house I discovered it works best upstairs at the front, meaning someone across the street from us has an ADSL line connected to a wireless router with rather less than no security - I didn’t even need sniffing software like Macstumbler, the Airport Setup Assistant found it immediately on its own - the router’s SSID is ‘default.’

So Jon was right - I could have saved myself �150 for the router and �25 a month… just plugged in an Airport card and seen What Came Up.

Still, my neighbour’s WiFi router won’t work in my kitchen. And it certainly doesn’t reach as far as my garden shed.

The discussion about iPods not giving ‘true’ random play is quite interesting; it highlights the fact that when we say we want an MP3 player to play ‘randomly’ in fact we mean anything but, and I’m a little surprised that the designers at Apple didn’t suss this from the get-go.
What we really want is… not to hear the same song twice in the same listening session, not to hear more than one track off the same album in one session if possible, and probably not to hear more than two songs by the same artist. In fact true randomness means that we might hear the same song 23 times or all the tracks from an album in correct order.
There are two ways round this; my favourite is to listen to your songs in alphabetical order by song title. This creates an amazing illusion of ‘randomness’.
The other is to set it on shuffle play and just pause/lock the unit between sessions; you can’t cconnect it to the computer and have to use the charger to avoid resetting the playlist. This method doesn’t ‘feel’ as random as the alphabetical method but at least you won’t hear ‘Cheap Astronaut’ by Baby Bird several times in one sitting. It’s my iPod’s favourite song. Don’t ask me why.

I was going to try and get my old Othermachines ‘zine working with Blogger, but actually I really like this design, so I think I’ll keep it.

After all, surely the whole point of blogs is that they are spontaneous and spending hours working on a new design or making my old design work with Blogger is surely contrary to the spirit of the enterprise.

Another top tip: don’t go on internet shopping sprees on nightshifts; not only is it a waste of money, you get woken up by delivery people the next day when you are trying to sleep.