My wife and daughter took a girl-scout trip this morning, which left my son and I alone in the house.  he’s been wanting to get outside the last couple of days, but he’s been running a fever on and off so he’s been pretty much cooped up.  This morning was gorgeous, and we spent a bit of time hanging out here (fixing his newest Lego Star Wars ship) before I grabbed my shower.  I would have loved to take a walk with him, but one of our students from Central has been asking me to come over and get his Wii online for a couple of weeks and I set it up with him for this morning.

It wasn’t a big deal to my son, as this student’s younger brother is one of my son’s most favorite people in the world (and his older sister is his favorite baby-sitter).  So around 11 I called up the family and got permission to come over and mess with their network.  As a bonus, the mom just got over being sick for the better part of a week and I could see how she’s getting on back in “real life.”  It’s a pastor thing.

I expected this job to take about 15 minutes.  Which means, in geek time, I should have put the better part of 2 hours aside to hack around till I came up with a solution.  Interestingly enough, that’s about how long it took.  Here were some highlights:

• A linksys router that was set for the default configuration – and yet wasn’t even connected to the web.
• I was confirmed on the evilness of Windows Vista – what idiot thought up that UI?  I mean, are you kidding me? (I had to test wireless networking and I left my macbook at home as it was rendering video).
• I got to flash a dslmodem/wireless router’s firmware – only to see it’s web-ui replaced by one branded by Verizon, which apparently hired a group of drunk Aardvarks to design it.
• I got so used to not having to “log in” to my web account that I find dsl’s need to do this a bit confusing (once I found that page in the router’s UI, however, the Wii connected w/o a hitch).

Out of all this, I looked at the (now completely unplugged) linksys router and checked it’s number – wrt54g v6.  Three thoughts went through my mind:

1. This family isn’t going to be using this.  In fact, it was only adding confusion to their setup.
2. This is a router that is compatible with the dd-wrt firmware.
3. NEW TOY TO PLAY WITH!

I asked the family if I could snag this router and play around with it some – and they said, “Yah, sure.”  So now I have a linksys wrt54g router running dd-wrt (installed w/o a hitch) AND set up to be a client bridge.  Which means that I have all sort’s a new tricks I can play with my wireless network.  Let the games begin.

Oh, and if the family that was kind enough to let me play with this thing ever wants it back, the good news is that they’ll get a better router in return.  Much fun!

So,