Table for one

Sorry about the lack of technical postings for a while, this last month or so has been rather hard for me.

On 13th February I became suspicious that something wasn’t quite right with Michelle, my partner for the last 17 or so years. My suspicions increased and I ended up setting up my laptop in the equipment cupboard as a packet sniffer running Ethereal (now WireShark). I then connected to the laptop via a Remote Desktop Connection and controlled the sniffer from my main PC. A note to anyone reading this who isn’t “a techie”; if you plan to use technology when cheating it’s probably best to understand the technology involved better than the person that you’re cheating on…

[Geek note: setting up the sniffer was actually considerably harder than I expected; mainly due to hardware issues; being able to monitor the network had never been a design constraint on the original installation or the subsequent equipment upgrades. I currently use a combined ADSL modem, router and WIFI access point and it proved impossible to sniff the WIFI network segment from the wired network and equally impossible to sniff the WIFI via the WIFI on my laptop. What’s more the fact that I’d replaced my hubs with switches would also have caused me problems… In the end I pulled out my “old hardware” box and connected up my old ADSL modem to the incoming line, put an old 8 port hub between that and the combined router and WIFI box and turned off the ADSL modem in the combined box. All network traffic was now routed across the hub to the old ADSL modem. Plugging my laptop into the hub gave me the logging capabilities that I required… ]

But I digress; the sniffer provided me with evidence that Michelle had been having an affair since mid January. I confronted her and we decided to try and see if we could “work it out” during our ski trip to Colorado. During the trip I decided that the relationship couldn’t continue and so on our return she moved out. We’re currently doing the separation of assets thing. We hope to be able to remain friends. Since I don’t hate her, I figure that nobody else is allowed to…

Right now I still find it quite difficult to concentrate enough to get any technical work done. I expect technical postings will resume once I get my head sorted out. Not sure when that will be. This morning has been the first time since we returned from Colorado that I’ve been able to sit down and code… So I guess things are getting better.