Dan coughed a lot today, so he stayed in the basement with a container of green tea, a cup, and a box of tissues. He played games and used his new netbook to look up hints for playing his games. He was shivering due to high fever, so he turned up the thermostat in the basement. He looked really sick.
Rena had a sore throat and high fever (101 Fahrenheit). Shirley had an upset stomach. I felt sick myself (nothing hurts), so I spent the afternoon sleeping.
I suddenly realized that the 4x4 magic square that the Arthur Benjamin (the Mathemagician) solved last weekend is a set of 15 independent linear equations with 12 unknowns. The 12 unknowns are the empty cells in the magic square. The 15 equations represent the sums of the 3 bottom rows, the sum of the 4 columns, the sum of the 2 diagonals, the sum of the 4 corner cells, and sums of the 5 interior 2x2 squares. My understanding of linear algebra is that you may not be able to solve this set of equations because it has more equations than unknowns.
I placed the new Canon MX860 printer in the family room near Dan's new iMac, so both iMacs could print on it. The new MX860 printer is connected wirelessly, which means that you can print on it even if the nearby iMac is asleep. Rena did not want to have any printer on her desk, so I retired the old HP printer which has only a USB connection. Setting up a printer may sound simple, but I spent 5 hours doing it.
The first problem was that the setup program was stuck on the iMac when I first started it. So I tried to set it up using my Windows XP laptop. The installation process ignored the fact that I wanted to set the printer to use the wireless network, and instead it configured it to use the USB connection. I repeated the installation process several times and I explicitly uninstalled everything and rebooted the laptop to ensure a clean environment. Alas, nothing helped. This was really frustrating. I thought to junk the printer (not even return it) since I wasted so much time on the installation.
I saw the first glimmer of hope when I used the printer's control panel to set the printer to access a wired LAN. When I connected the printer to the Ethernet hub it got an IP address automatically, and I could access the printer's HTTP server with my browser. When I followed the instructions for setting the printer for a wired LAN, the installation process again set it up to use the USB connection and not the wired LAN. However, when I simply ignored the installation instructions and tried to discover all printers on the network, I was able to set up the printer on my laptop. I was relieved. At least I could access the printer from the wired LAN.
Finally, when I tried to set up the iMac to access the printer, I discovered that the iMac itself was hosed. I rebooted it, and now the setup program worked. Moreover, I could set up the printer to use wireless LAN without any problems.
This process was complete waste of time, and I learned only one thing out of this ordeal: you should reboot your Mac before installing new software/hardware.
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