Problems with connecting at a hotel …

When traveling and trying to use the hard wire at a hotel, you may find that the provided Ethernet cable won’t work. This is because hotels typically have a very outdated infrastructure and are still running at 10Mbps.

Most new computers are set with network speed set to auto detect, but this relies on the hardware being able to handle that detection, which older, cheaper network boxes aren’t able to do.

In the lower right corner of your screen, you should see your network icon that will look something like:

The network connection is the one that looks like a pair of computer screens ().

The ).

When you are connected to a hard-wire, the tray should look something like:

The icon for the network connection will flash as network activity occurs.

If you don’t see the icon for the Ethernet connection, right click on the one for the Wi-Fi to get the context menu and choose “Open Network Connections”:

This will bring you to the network connections, which will list all of the available network options that have been configured on your machine:

If the connection shows “Limited Connectivity” instead of “Connected”, you most likely don’t have an IP address.

Right clicking on the “Local Area Connection” (or whichever one is associated with your Ethernet card) will give you a similar context menu that should let you check your connection by choosing “Status”.

This will show you a more detailed status of the connection:

You can try clicking the “Repair” button to force the connection to restart, but this typically won’t work in the hotel scenario. So going back to our context menu for the Ethernet connection, choose “Properties”:

This will bring up the property sheet for the connection:

Click on the “Configure” button next to the adapter to get to the settings. This will bring up the properties:

Go to the “Advanced” tab to change the link speed to 10Mbps:

Click “OK” and the adapter should reset and you’ll be good to go.

Facebook Annoyances …

I’ve been busy, so I haven’t logged into Facebook for a while now. I ran into somebody who said to send them a friend request, so I pulled up my Facebook app on my iPhone and ran through the process of logging in there.

I hadn’t used that app for a really long time, and like most iPhone apps, you have to start over once it upgrades, so that didn’t surprise me.

What did catch me by surprise was what happened when I tried logging on from my Mac later that day. First thing that happened was I got an unfamiliar screen that said I had logged in from a location I hadn’t used before:

OK, fine – seems like they’re trying to protect me, so I guess I can deal with this – but why they think I’m logging in from a different location is a bit off. So I’m expecting some sort of confirmation of identity, which would be fine. So next comes the usual Captcha to make sure I’m not a machine:

I type in the phrase, and get to the next screen, where the first surprise happens, apparently to identify myself I’m going to have to recognize people tagged in photos:

I’m a little worried now, since I don’t spend a lot of time looking at photos from my friends, and I’ve seen a LOT of photos from the ones I do know that don’t really look like the person to begin with. But it looks like this is the only option.

So I start trying to identify the photos, and the very first one I see is a picture of a cow and calf … Hmm, this is going to be hard. Obviously none of my friends are cows, so it must be pulling from somebody’s picture album. Of course I only know about 20 people who might post a picture of their livestock, and probably the same number that might think a calf was cute enough to take a picture of.

So I skip that one, and try again – now I get a picture of somebody celebrating. It’s a picture of people in their 20′s, so I’m thinking either an old photo, or one of my younger friends, but I don’t recognize any of them. Two down and no luck. At this point I even try looking at photos on the iPhone (which for some reason still works), no luck, so this is skip number two ….

Next I get what is obviously some sort of a class picture from the 60′s or 70′s – I probably know this person, but how would I know who the picture belongs to ? So it goes, with all 7 pictures being people, places or things I don’t recognize.

Then the next annoyance: after failing, you have to wait an hour to retry, so I can’t even go back in to see if I might get more recognizable pictures.

The next time through I think I recognize one, but still no luck. OK, wait another hour.

Finally on the third try (the one where I started writing this post), I get lucky. Every picture that comes up is an actual person, and I recognize all but one. Luckily for me even the one that has more than one of my friends on it appears to have worked. And I’m back in …

And in this whole process, there is no link to get help, or alternative way to get past this process. What would you do if you had some sort of vision impairment.

FAIL – Facebook … you need to fix this.