A few days ago I got a wireless range expander to boost our wireless transmission into all corners of our house. Being a tech professional, I didn’t think getting this thing to work would be too difficult. Well, I got it to work, but I still have no idea how.

I started by taking everything out of the box. Read the instruction. Followed the instructions. Couldn’t get past step 3 of about 10. So I did a search online and found a kind soul who posted revised instructions. Turns out the manufacturer completely left out the step where I needed to change my computer’s network setting to a static IP in order to connect to the expander before changing its setting.

So I tried this and I was able to get to the expander’s control panel. Did everything as instructed, found my home network, entered the correct security type and password. And I was done. It said so. It said it was a success and that I was done and I’d be able to hook into my network through the expander. But I couldn’t. And I had no idea why not because there were no messages or any other feedback (that I knew how to interpret, anyway) telling me why I couldn’t connect to the dang thing.

Then I did what I tend to do in these situations - I started futzing around with all of the settings on the expander. I tried messing with the network name, tried the password in various formats, DHCP, static IP, MAC address, lots of things. Things didn’t work for about an hour.

At some point, the thing worked. I have no idea why. I believe my futzing at that point was really refutzing of things I had already tried 10 times before. But apparently, some magic combination of settings did the trick. So now my expander works. I get great wireless signal strength throughout the house. But I’m really dreading the day when I need to reconfigure the things for whatever reason because I still have no idea why it’s working.

Why is it so difficult to provide useful feedback in these things? I’m flumoxed.

This is cool. I don’t know how long it’s been available, but when I saw it, it was one of those things that immediately made a lot of sense to me. At the Yahoo! home page, the main navigation menu along the left edge of the page now has list items sized according to how important they are to me. I don’t know what algorithm they use, probably some combination of frequency and recency, but it definitely know my Yahoo! usage tendencies.

This is different from other cluster menus. Those show the relative prominence of items based on how the entire user base accesses them. The Yahoo! version applies to just me. And that makes it a very compelling and personal presentation. It’s such a minor visual modification to the menu, but it sure does make a difference.

What I’d really like to see to complement this is a way for me to dive deep into the site from this top level menu. I don’t want drop downs or other expanding menus. I’m not sure what the exact solution is, but I’m imagining something that uses an item’s visual characteristics to guide me to specific places within each category. Something that’s clean at the top level, but surfaces links to deep content.

My wife and I recently bought a house. The market has certainly softened compared to the past few years, but it’s still brutal for buyers and there. (And for some sellers, so we’ve heard.) Overall, we’re very happy with the house we ended up with, but the process was definitely stressful.

Like many people in the Bay Area, we rely more and more on online services as part of our daily lives. Buying a home was no different and we made use of numerous web-based resources as we searched for a home. It was certainly useful and convenient to be able to search the MLS for listings through various filters. It was also great to be able to compare target homes with comparables in the area and then to be able to map them out. Here are some thoughts looking back on the experience now that we’re done:

1. Despite all of the online resources, we were still very happy to have a live person working with us as an agent. He was helpful in education us about the various neighborhoods and locations. He was also very helpful in communicating with the sellers and their agents. Having a professional with experience helping us was something we couldn’t have attained through online means.

2. We wanted a better online mapping system. The maps we found would map one house per map. I wanted a consolidated map that would put all 10 of our target homes for the day in a single view. Save some trees. Makes things easier to organize. Let us see the relative locations of each house to the others.

3. Why can’t the listing be more accurate and detailed in their details? We were looking for fairly specific qualities in a home and rarely did a listing have the information we wanted. Specifically, we wanted a good office space that was large and isolated from the rest of the house. Giving us this information would help us and it seems that it would also help the seller. It’s about finding the right match. Instead, we ended up visiting a lot of houses that looked like potential fits, but ended up being completely inappropriate for our needs.

4. I know some people need to buy home unseen due to tight moving schedules or financial limitations. But there was no way we would have done that. We came across online agents selling homes through the web, but it was important for us to see the houses in person. There are so many details that done come through in a listing or even through online photos or the virtual tours. It was also important to us to get a feel for the neighborhood and that’s something that required us to visit physically.

OS X’s Finder has an Undo function. I discovered this a while ago and I’ve learned to really appreciate it. Every now and then I find that I’ve renamed the wrong file or hastely tossed unintended files into the trash. A simple Command-z to undo it. Not groundbreaking, but yet another nice detail that makes OS X such a pleasant environment to work in. That’s all.