In rout

I finally caved the other day to two purchases: Book the last for Harry Potter, and an Airport Extreme base station for my growing home network.

The book had to happen at some point. Twenty-odd bucks seems a bit steep, but as Jason Bourne once said, fuck it.

I said the same thing myself, but possibly more than once, about the base station. We have pretty straightforward networking needs at home: Three users, two of whom are wireless. This should be pretty god-damned simple, but of course it is not.

We bought a Belkin (that's an Old English word for completely the fuck useless) router, which sometimes is really satisfactory, but sometimes requires me to perform all sorts of confusing rituals to get a stable signal.

I have a high tolerance for technological hassles, so when I start cursing about computers, the situation is well on its way to totally out of hand.

The upshot, after much more ado than necessary, is that a new router is en route to my location.

That reminds me: If you spend any time at all listening to police scanners, you are familiar with the re-pronunciation of en route as In Rout. As far as I can tell, this re-pronunciation is universal.

When I hear those words, as I just did here in my office in sunny Walla Walla, they conjure an image of a couple of patrol cars fleeing ahead of an advancing column of Visigoths.

Alas, this never comes to pass.