Sleepy in Seattle

Well, Seattle is nice. My room here is about 30C (86F) in the "nice" apartment. I'm not too happy, but too overwhelmed to do anything about it. One of my original criteria for short stay was a gym. This building doesn't have a gym, but they do have a game room with nice pinball, pool table, and Foosball. Tonight I ventured out to the game room that was doubling as a kids rumpus. I sat beside a six year old beating the heck out of a pinball machine making farting noises after which I was grateful for my kids whom I miss dearly. On Tuesday I took out the Pi and the junk I brought to try and fiddle with it. The power adapter, 7.5V 800amp, seemed to get the hub powered without exploding (I blew up some speakers before I left home by mistaking a 9V adapter for a 6V device. Smoke and pop.) I read that Windows 7 has DHCP built in via "Share Internet Connection." My portable was connected via wifi to a router. So I plugged the hard line into the hub (and to the Pi.) First thing I needed to do was assign a static IP to the portable on the lan interface. Then I was able to turn on connection sharing (you need two active networks before you can play router.) But Windows 7 did not act as a DHCP server... guidance said install nmap and do a subnet scan. The Pi was never issued an IP, and I suspect DHCP was not part of the setup so not running. So I installed openDHCP. And the first thing I saw, running it as standalone, was that it was getting a broadcast request from Spock (my Pi), but giving the error "No matching DHCP range" - that is somewhat cryptic! The problem, after fiddling, was the the default IP of the DHCP server in the configuration file was 192.168.0.1. I thought you weren't supposed to use 0... and most of us use 192.168.1.1. So of course changing the ini file solved the problem but not after some head scratching. So after a few hours and getting as far as PuTTY to the Pi (not using nmap because in DHCP stand alone you know what the first IP leased is, and it tells you if you can't guess) I gave up for the night. I don't think I care about turning the portable into a router yet.