Every once in a while it occurs to me that I'm not seeing the whole picture from where I stand in life... Today was one of those days.

My wife, bless her heart, could not get the wireless network to work on her laptop. I could not get the wireless network to work on the laptop. This, as they say, is a bad thing. Something needed to be done. Something incredibly savvy and technical. Off I go with theories of the dual antenna twisted this way and that, cones of silence, and in­ter­fer­ence from a nearby military airfield (isn't this every military conspiracy theorists dream?) dancing in my head. I mess with this, tweak that, check the encryption key, etc.

Fast forward thirty minutes. While I've been doing my best to determine the effects a minor alignment of the planets magnified by Stonehenge would have on my poor little home wireless network, my wife has been a bit more practical: She moved onto the couch with the laptop. That worked.

I'll skip the gnashing of teeth and other things that ensued. However, I will note that the stack of 12 hardcover books that were directly in between the wireless card of the laptop and the router (6 inches from the card) when moved, seemed not to interfere with the connection at all...

I find a bit of humor in the fact that a stack of books, of all things, would be the cause of a bad wireless network connection. Guess that's revenge for saying, "print is dead," all this time.

Hrmph.