Meow!

While doing my usual scan of the news while drinking my morning coffee, I noticed an article on hypoallergenic cats.  Obviously we're not currently in the market for another cat (and especially not for one that costs around $4000USD).  Normally I'd have given the article a passing skim and moved on, but the picture caught my eye.  I took one look and thought, "ZOMG, it's Jaws!"

They're not identical (Jaws is fluffier), but I think there is unquestionably some common heritage in their lines.



Hm.  If these varmint are selling for four thousand bucks a pop, I wonder how much we could get for a limited-edition one like ours?  (She may not be quite as hypoallergenic, but she's had some teeth removed to reduce maintenance costs.)

...

Not that atara would likely let me sell her cat.

Techie question

We recently purchased a wireless router to replace the pocket router/access point that we've been using for our notebook computers.  I have come up with a plan on how to wire the lot up, but I have a question about how XP and the network will function if I wire it that way, and I was hoping that some of you folk could chime in (since most of you are more tech-savvy than I am).

The way we have them wired right now is interesting, but not that unusual.  We have both computers directly wired together with a CAT5e crossover cable, giving us 1GB file and printer sharing across an IPX network.  Both computers also have a 100MB TCP/IP wired connection to a router, with the file/print sharing disabled.  We have a pocket router configured as a secure wireless access point plugged into the router, which allows our notebook computers to connect to the internet with their onboard wireless LAN.

The way that I am thinking of wiring it is very similar with only a couple of small, but significant changes.  I'm going to leave the crossover connection untouched, but I am planning to enable file and printer sharing on the TCP/IP connections to the new wireless router.  The idea is to give our notebooks access to the file library and printer on our home network.  This is a bit less secure than our configuration above, but the router has a hardware firewall, and we have software firewalls running on all four machines, so my thinking is that if I put fairly secure password protection on the connection then we should be reasonably safe.

I've done up a visual representation of the current and proposed networks below.

The question: Is there a way to instruct Windows that it should only share files on the desktop systems across the 1GB connection?  Does it have a preset order in which it will cycle through network connections in order to choose the ones it needs (e.g., by network card ID, connection number, network type - IPX vs TCP/IP - etc.)?  Is there a different way to wire this up in order to make the question moot?  (With the assumption that we'll still have a 1GB connection between our desktops at the end of the day.)