Techmeme linked me to this amazing Bill Gates e-mail rant. It’s gratifying to know that even the creator of the operating system finds it infuriating, especially when it just took me 10 minutes to reconnect my old laptop to my 802.11g (WiFi) network. I mistyped the WEP key, allegedly, either in the first box or in the confirmation box, upon which Windows repeatedly erased both entries and made me start over. Why hide my characters? I understand there’s a security value, but typing 26 hex characters blind is an error-prone activity; at least give me an option to show them. Why have two boxes? What possible reason there is that I would need to confirm a passkey when using it (as opposed to creating it), I don’t know. And the best question of all: why in the world did Windows forget the WEP key, in the first place? I did have to clone my PC’s MAC address to get my router to work with Comcast (thanks for making life that much harder, Comcast), but I didn’t think that affected the MAC address it uses internally to the network.

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