Big Time

Oooh, now I’m big time.

First, we finally went wireless. Sort of. We have this older Gateway laptop that’s perfect for Web browsing and reading e-mail when we don’t want to go into the basement office. It sits on the kitchen table (that’s where the Ethernet connection is on the first floor). Of course that’s annoying when we want to, say, eat. (The house is completely wired for Ethernet — basement, all the bedrooms, but not the first floor. Grr.)

I picked up a Linksys 802.11b access point and PC Card adapter on the cheap — less than $120 for the pair. The reason is simple: 802.11g stuff is much, much faster, so people aren’t buying the slower 802.11b equipment. Prices drop. But folks don’t do the math — the 802.11b stuff does about 11 Mbps. Our home’s cable connection is only about 1 Mbps, so a faster internal network doesn’t do a thing. That is, 802.11b is more than enough for any home user.

Now we can unplug the laptop and I can get the Giants’ stats during the game without moving from the sofa. Not that I want to see the Giants’ stats…

The other tech news is that I finally became a Web reseller. I own so many domains (starting with kantor.com and whizkid.com) that getting a “reseller” account made more sense. All it means is that I get a huge amount of storage space and bandwidth to divide among my sites. Because some of them (like PenguinBooks.com) are only one page, I only have to devote a little space to them and thus have more space for sites like this one.

The other benefit is that I can buy all the domains I want and only have to pay to register them ($11 per year or less); Web hosting is “free” for all intents and purposes. And if a friend wants to create a simple site, I can do it for nothin’. Neat.