June 15 2007 - The Day My Gadgets Went Bonkers

It started out as a normal day. I woke up and checked my Nokia E61i and as expected, it has downloaded a couple of emails from my office MS Exchange Server. I disconnected my Apple Airport Express from my home DSL modem, had coffee and headed on over to the office. Since its a Friday, I parked at the mall and stopped over at a Starbucks between the mall and my office. I ordered my second cup of coffee and attempted to connect to a local wifi access point at Starbucks and that's when it started...

When I opened up my Macbook, it took a long time before it detected the wifi access point I wanted to use. Once I got the logon screen of the wifi access provider (Globe WIZ), the page took a long time to load. After a few minutes I was up and surfing the web. A mug of coffee and stick of cigarette later, I decided it was time to head on over to my office. I fired up my Bluetooth wireless headset and connected it to my Nokia E61i so I can wirelessly listen to TWiT's 100th podcast episode. But when I played the podcast, no sound on the headset! So I did some troubleshooting. I re-paired my wireless headset and my phone and tested it again -- still not working. I restarted my phone and after a couple of minutes of waiting, I got to listen to the podcast.

When I arrived at the office, I connected my Apple Airport Express at my office DSL connection. When I opened up my MacBook, it can't detect my Airport Express! After fiddling with my MacBook for a couple of minutes, I decided to reset my Airport Express to factory default configuration. That did the trick -- my MacBook has resumed communicating with the Airport Express but there's a problem: our DSL modem has a "custom" IP configuration and I wasn't able to take note of that configuration!

Good thing everything got fixed later in the day but the successive failure of my gear made me think: was there some sort of a solar storm that may have caused this?