Well....what can I say.  If my dog was a Great Dane or Great Pyrenees or a Saint Bernard.....I'd still make a house dog out of it.  That's just me. 

In the last couple of months I've become a bona fide fan of Netgear equipment.  As most of you know we were suffering severe slow downs during the evening hours.  I purchased a Netgear N600 dual band router....installed it and turned off the wireless part of our RG.  We moved to the 5 gHz band and our problems with slow speed were over.  But...the RG and router are located in our computer room on the west end of our house and by the time the signal passes through 5 or 6 walls.....and all the way to the east end of the house the connection to my wife's iPad was not 100% dependable.  My laptop, however handled it ok.  But I gave in and this morning took delivery on a Netgear dual band range extender.  Set it up in the east part of the house and now we have full strength and speeds everywhere.  Set up was unbelievably simple.  Neither unit needs any software so no CD is included.  In fact the setups were almost totally automatic.  I think I had to push two buttons two times each on both units to get them working together on both bands and that was all.  Time will tell regarding durability.  The housings are plastic but once set up they aren't going anywhere so should be no problem there. 

Only problems I have now are 1.with my Toshiba laptop which works just fine with the wireless and Internet access but every time I try to get it to connect to our home net it refuses because Ipv6 isn't turned on.  That is a problem I've never had before and it means I can't access it from other PC's.  2.and the blasted Windows 7 operating system which keeps telling me that I don't have permission to access that folder or this folder or file is driving me up the wall.  I'm the blasted owner for crying out loud.  I should have access to everything on the doggone HDD.  I hate Microsoft!!!!!  I've tried making changes to permissions, etc. etc. etc.  I've messed with the system until I'm so out of patience that I could just pitch the whole set-up out into the yard. I've got two folders on my external hard drive (connected to my desktop) which are just flat inaccessible from my Dell laptop.  Unfortunately those two folders are both full of photo images and my family videos.  Of course they are available from the desktop itself.....just not from my laptop.  But other folders right next to them?......no problem.  I've turned on "sharing" on both of them and I've set permissions to allow all functions.  No luck.

     Well....one other thing I do like about the Netgear router is that USB port for an external HDD or any other form of extra memory.  So far I've never denied access to anything connected to that port.  By the way....that same port can be used to turn a non-wireless printer into a wireless unit.  But since my printer is already wirelss I don't need that function.

     For the astronomers among you......the crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus will be amazingly close together in the evening tomorrow and Sunday evening.  Late at night Mars has been fairly bright high overhead.

     Hope y'all have a wonderful weekend.  Alfie sends his heart felt thanks for all the birthday greetings.  It was a cold, windy morning today and he loves the cold temperatures.  I thought he was going to walk my legs off.  At his age he's supposed to be slowing down.  I know I sure am.

     Tomorrow a 106 year old rivalry comes to an end....as University of Kansas and University of Missouri meet in their last basketball game.  Both are nationally rated.  Missouri is leaving the Big 12 conference and going over to the South Eastern Conference.  I've been following the Big 12 since it was the Big 6....then the Big 7 and the Big 8.   Then Texas U. joined and started messing things up so we've lost  Nebraska, Missouri, Colorado and Texas A & M.  Basketball is so very important at K.U.  The inventor of the game, Dr. James Naismith, was the school's first coach.  We lived on Naismith Drive when I was in school there.  Before our marriage I lived in the same dorm as Wilt Chamberlin.  Use to watch him duck as he walked through every doorway in the place.  The dunk shot was against the rules in those days....but during the pregame warm ups they let Wilt do spectacular dunks to whip up the fans in Phog Allen Fieldhouse.  Well....tomorrow is the end of a great series....Go Jayhawks!