I'm so glad our sprinklers are fixed!

For a couple of months, I've had to water the grass manually because several of our sprinkler heads were broken. They're pretty easy to replace, but for some reason it took a while for us to buy new ones and then take the time to put them in.

Now that they're in, I really appreciate our sprinklers so much more. It's so tedious to stand out there and water the grass. Sure, the water feels nice on a hot day, but still, I'd rather not have to be the one doing the watering. I did buy one of those oscillating sprinklers that you connect to a hose, but it hardly seemed effective. I still ended up manually watering our trees and the parts that the sprinkler couldn't reach, and also the front (I let the cheap plastic sprinkler water the back, while I took care of the front). It would take me between 30 minutes to a little over an hour depending on how much I felt I needed to water it on any given day. I even got a nice tan in the process. :P

I'm not able to use our sprinklers on timer though because one of the valves still needs replacing. But manually having to turn them on and then back off is still loads better than watering the grass by hand.

I dislike having a lawn in general. If ever move to another place, I definitely don't want somewhere with any grass at all. I hate having to water and mow it. Meh. No more grass for me. Hardscaping all the way! Or maybe some bushes or something that requires less upkeep than grass.

A dying buffalo!

No, not a real buffalo. The wireless on my Buffalo WHR-G125 is slowly dying. About a week ago, I took a chance at ordering a refurbished Linksys E2500. I've had good luck with refurbs in the past and I used to have a Linksys WRT54G prior to the Buffalo, so I thought it would work out fine.

The E2500 only came with the router itself, an ethernet cable, power cord, and installation CD. It didn't come with any manuals at all. I used the CD, but it just got stuck on "downloading updates" for well over half an hour, so I manually went to 192.168.1.1 to set up the router. Thankfully, the manual setup worked.

Unfortunately, the E2500 got very poor signal to the same room compared to my WHR-G125. Even after a firmware upgrade and reset, nothing seemed to help much at all. The only place with excellent signal was in the same room as the router, which defeats the whole purpose of using wireless. So, I sent the E2500 back and in its place, I ordered an Asus RT-N10+.

The RT-N10+ isn't a dual band router, but after using the E2500, I found out that my laptop doesn't support the 5 GHz band anyway, so I have no use for a dual band router since all of my devices are 2.4 GHz.

I haven't received the Asus router yet, but hopefully it'll work a lot better since I'm back to using the Buffalo again until it gets here, which sucks since my wireless connection keeps getting dropped or is extremely slow that I can't do much of anything unless I feel like plugging in and being wired (which still works excellently).