It's Thanksgiving! I have received a special dispensation to prepare the turkey this year. We got a nice local turkey -- not one of the factory turkeys that animal rights activists complain about (although animal rights activists probably don't think anyone should eat turkey at all, especially not on a holiday like Thanksgiving, which they take to celebrate the subjugation of native cultures. I just like to eat turkey and am thankful to have an excuse). It turns out that it's getting harder and harder to buy local turkeys, though. We used to get a wonderful smoked turkey from Pekarski's. (Here's a 
nice article that mentions Pekarski's.) But they couldn't find a local turkey farmer to sell them turkey's this year. They need to get them early and can't have birds that have been frozen, but all of the local places are getting out of the business. Ours came from from Diemand Farms and we bought it through Watroba's -- a wonderful little mom and pop grocery store in North Amherst.
We have a lot to be thankful for. This morning I'm being thankful for my wireless network connection. I've been frustrated that it seems to drop connections regularly -- much more so than my old basestation did. I wasn't sure if it was the flaky network connection in my tibook (the antennas in the tibooks were always marginal) or some setting on the basestation. The basestation had some advanced settings, but the one time I tried changing them, I wasn't able to talk to the basestation at all anymore and had to reset it to defaults to connect at all. With my new laptop exhibiting the same behavior, however, I decided to try poking at the settings again.
I looked around on the web last night for a good guide to the advanced settings on the basestation and couldn't find much -- mostly I found things that said, "If you don't know what these are, you're better off to leave them alone." It turns out it's really hard to search for anything meaningful about the settings because advertisers use them to sell their product "buy this basestation with advanced settings, including DTIM Interval, Beacon Interval, Fragmentation Threshold, blah, blah, blah." I did find this page that actually provides some nice definitions. That was a big help.
D-link provides a lot of FAQ-type information -- almost none of it really technical in nature -- and eventually I found a few things to adjust. One thing I always thought was funny was that on the advanced settings screen, two of the parameters show values that are outside of their theoretical range: RTS Threshold and Fragmentation look like they're set to 4095, but the ranges on both only go up to 2432 and 2346. You can even see it in their documentation. When I tried to make the adjustment, the basestation said those values were out of range, so I reset them to their maximum values and then I was able to make my adjustments.
I set the Beacon Interval to 50 rather than 100 and set the DTIM interval to 2. I also turned off the 4X feature, which appears to be some proprietary way to "increase throughput". It warns in red letters that if you're using adaptors that don't support it, the wireless connection may "degrade or drop completely". So that's probably what the problem was. It hasn't been long enough to be sure there's a difference, but it hasn't dropped a connection yet. Something to be thankful for!