Today has been a rollercoaster sort of a day. First, I woke up depressed because Mario Kart DS totally came out of nowhere and surprised me with its release. Don't ask me how because I don't know. I became consciously aware of its release only just recently.

So I complained about that and my wife said I should buy it. So I went to Best Buy and they didn't have it. Neither did Target. I went to Game Crazy and the FedEx truck arrived the same time I did, so I snagged one of the three surplus copies they got in.

This got me thinking about wireless, because I would definitely like to play the game wirelessly on my DS. Before that, though, my wife and I went to Del Taco. It's a chain I'd not heard of before, but they put a new one in a few weeks ago so I wanted to try it out. Turns out their food is actually really, really good (better than Taco Bell) and the price is affordable (cheaper than Taco Bell). They actually use high-quality ingredients, and the people there were cheerful and quick. I'll definitely be eating there again.

Anyway, I also picked up the new Big & Rich CD because they are awesome.

Then I went home and decided to get wireless enabled on my Qwest modem. I called support and they got it done, but I couldn't get the DS to detect an access point. This is when I should have stopped. I didn't. Instead, I went into the modem configuration and tried changing the channel, to see if that would impact the DS. It didn't, but it screwed my modem. Not only that, but it screwed other things.

I called Qwest again, and they said "Oh, wow, you're hosed, better contact the computer manufacturer because your card is bad." I hung up, then checked the other computer. It also wasn't running right, which made me decide the modem was at least part of the problem. So I called up Qwest again.

This time, I got another lady. She was a little grumpy when I couldn't hear her very well (her voice was quite muffled and my phone is crappy to boot), but we worked through things. Basically, the modem was totally screwed and it messed up my computer. We got one of the computers running online, but I couldn't get my main (gaming) machine back up and running. The lady said that basically, I'll have to contact the manufacturer.

She had become a lot nicer by the end of the phone call, which didn't really make sense, but oh well. I hung up and said to myself, "Well, I'm not going to wait on Dell." So my options as I saw it were to get a new ethernet card, or to try screwing around with the hardware configurations some more. After much testing, I was finally able to uninstall the card, then reinstall it and now it works perfectly. I'm back online.

Of course, Mario Kart DS still won't let me play online. I'm going to just try the offline mode now. Also, the Big & Rich CD is thus far a disappointment. We'll see how it holds up to repeated listens, but the first one was mind-numbingly awesome and this newer one is just... really good. Kind of a letdown, but maybe it'll grow on me.

On an unrelated note, the UPS truck showed up as I was finally getting my Internet running. They had another game, Disney's Chicken Little, which was cool because i wasn't sure I could get the publisher to send it. They did, so I'll review that here sometime in the near future. They also sent a bobblehead doll, made out of pewter or something. Heavy and intricately carved and... broken. The legs snapped off from the base, which kind of sucks because I can't imagine gluing anything together and making it look even halfway decent. Even so, it was awesome of them to send it. First non-game swag a publisher has decided to send. Will it affect the rating I give the game? No, but it was still neat.

Anyway, I'm halfway through the day now. The way it's been going, I should probably go sleep while I'm ahead. You know I won't, though.