I have no mouse, and I must scream

Someone sic Sanzo on our legal tech people. Not only do they have our computers locked down so tightly that I need an administrator to install a USB trackball, but they for some reason refuse to remote into my machine and install it—which they have done on at least half a dozen occasions before—and are requiring me to sit here and wait for someone to show up in person.

At least they backed off on making me fill out a new tech requisition form (! it's my own damn trackball, as was the one before it that this is replacing) and having my boss sign off on it.

I'm just fortunate to have much more comfort in using keyboard shortcuts to get around computers than most. And I have renewed sympathy for people using screen readers to navigate the web.

Sheesh.

Tell me what to read

I'm having trouble picking my next book. The past few things I've read (The Somnambulist, A Matter of Oaths, The Truelove) haven't been satisfactory, which I think is leaving me very bleh about the prospect of putting effort into another book, rather than just mindlessly playing NetHack and web puzzle games. Today I tried reading a book I saw oracne recommend, Anne Gracie's The Perfect Rake, and, finding myself unusually critical of the prose, put it down to try some other time.

So, a poll. I'm mostly looking for something that will be really satisfactory, something I can sink my teeth into without feeling cranky about the construction of the plot, or the prose, or the treatment of gender, or whatever. Strong likeable female characters a plus, after the unsatisfactory books above. I suspect that humor and quirk may be minuses rather than pluses just now; ditto very sad or very dark (yes, I know Use of Weapons is a poll choice, but I've read that before, know what I'm getting, and think it would be okay). Also, something that's not too much work at the beginning would be good.

Edit: thanks, all! As of 8:15 Wednesday morning The Steerswoman's Road has 44.4% of the votes, and that and the accompany comments have convinced me to bring it into work and try it over lunch. But feel free to suggest fallbacks or add data on the other stuff in the poll.

( A dozen options, by author: )

Stupid router tricks

This weekend I installed a Belkin N Wireless Router (F5D8233-4). (Our old router required rebooting every eight hours of running BitTorrent, which was tedious.) It's working fine for Chad, who's directly plugged into it through an Ethernet cable, but I'm experiencing annoying wireless connection disruptions.

Specifically, connecting to the Internet starts timing out; I click on Windows XP's little Wireless Network Connection Status icon, and in the resulting dialog box I see the name for the network flickering off and on (the name itself), and the speed jumping between 54.0 Mbps to 1.0 Mbps. Clicking "repair" fixes this, for a while, or sometimes it comes back on its own; in two hours this has happened at least six times, while I did nothing other than surf the web.

I pretty much installed this with the defaults, except for enabling encryption (128bit WEP) and setting up a forwarded port for torrenting. We have DSL, so PPPoE, but since Chad's having no problems I doubt the problem's on that end. My laptop has b/g wireless; the router also supports the draft n standard, because Chad's new tablet does. The user manual is not helpful. Does anyone have any suggestions of what settings to futz with or other troubleshooting to do?