I’ve been busy the last few hours paying Geek Tax: The amazing waste of time that you must endure when crap stops working.

Justin told me about it today when I was describing my sudden inexplicable problems with WPA and my new card.

After having everything in order the night before last I cuddled up in bed next to my love and her iBook and got ready to write some code. I fired up my laptop and zonk. No connection. I wrestled with it for a few hours last nigt before love enticed me back to bed and got me to forget about it.

Tonight between rounds of screeming and feeding with my little son, I worked on it some more. I totally wiped out wpa_supplicant and wifi-radar and started all over. One thing I found, madwifi has issues passing dhcp info. So I had to go with a static ip. When I used wpa_passphrase for my key it failed saying the key was wrong. If I plain texted it like linux journal said i’d need to. It worked fine. Finally I got all things in place, restarted wpa_supplicant and restarted networking and it’s back up.

For the moment.

So there is Geek Tax paid. I’m finding lately that I pay a LOT in geek tax.