Then the major problem happened, and it took until today to figure it out. For the last couple weeks, every time I made a phone call my wireless connection would fail.

I searched online for answers and found nothing. I ended up switching the order of the devices to go from the modem to the Vonage router and then finally into the wireless router. That worked for about week. Yesterday the problem of lost wireless connection when on the phone returned.

After time spent on the phone with both Vonage and Trendnet the problem was pinpointed and solved.

The problem wasn’t a conflict between the router and Vonage router. It was between the router and the cordless phone that was connected to the router.

It turns out that both the phone and the wireless router have the same 2.4ghz signal and since the phone base and wireless router are near each other, I was having problems with them both using the same channel.

If you have this problem the solution is to log into your router admin, turn off the auto channel select option and pick a different channel. Save the changes and test it.

I hope this helps anyone with the same problems I had.

Yes, there we have it. Technology has come so far.

Happy new year!

The next evening, my lovely bride handed me one very wet flash drive. My flash drive ended up in the wash, spin cycle and all. I was rather bummed out, because, while I love it when my wifey does the laundry, I just washed $20+ worth of storage. Yeah, it was only $20, but still. I never even got to use it!

Then I had a thought, that maybe, since there were no moving parts, the drive would still work if it dried out. There was nothing to lose at this point, so I put it on the shelf and forgot about it for a month.

Fast forward to last night. I had some files to transfer and figured now was a good time to try it out. I plugged the drive into my USB hub…. the light came on, and the icon showed up on my wonderful iMac desktop. Hmmm… this is promising. Double clicked and sure enough, the window opened showing me the default structure. I copied 400mb worth of files to it, and while kinda slow, the files copied!

This morning, I went to work, and right away I plugged in the drive, and copied the files to my work system. Not a single problem, everything copied over perfectly. I find it amazing that a small little piece of computer equipment can be put through a cycle of laundry,  including soap and spin cycle, and given sufficient time to dry, it still works. Kudos to SanDisk.

I use their Ultra II memory cards too for my digital camera. I also have a 512MB flash drive too, and that’s never let me down either. I’ll continue to buy SanDisk products whenever I need them. What a great product.

Tonight, I hit my very first triple! Not just of the season, but of my entire city rec softball life! I roped the ball really well between left and center, easily made the double and while about half way to second decided to stretch it out and see if I could make it. I should have been nailed. The throw beat me there, just like every other time I tried to stretch it out. But I had a really good slide, and the 3rd baseman tagged me on the chest while my leg was sitting on the bag. I was so pumped!

I followed that up a couple bats later with a double. Two extra base hits in one night! Last year I hit about .650, and every single hit was a single. We won pretty big, but I’m not sure what the score was… somewhere around 16 – 5.

See ya around.

Jeff