Wifi mysteries.
Yay for technology that doesn't make sense. The airport network we set up was working beautifully for a while, then not long after we mounted my node up onto the wall, it started behaving weirdly. My connection speeds were slowing down or just all together failing. Sometimes the management utility upstairs would show my node in its list, sometimes it wouldn't. While troubleshooting it this morning, we ended up taking it down off the wall mount, and putting it back on the top shelf of my desk, and then everything was working better again! We suspect that whatever that wall is made of up at the top, it's blocking the signal from getting through, but from the slightly lower vantage point, there isn't the same stuff behind the sheet rock, and there's also an archway nearby, so we think that maybe there is less stuff in the way blocking the wifi. At any rate, it works again, and suddenly the issues I was having with gaim and adept and firefox have gone away again. Meh. Stupid technology.