Bitten again...and again

I think my poor long term memory is causing me to run into the same problems over and over again. One of the dumbest oversights I've made in the past (when I had no experience using a laptop), was forgetting to enable the wireless on the case before trying to connect to a network. Yesterday I was given a laptop to fix and wasn't given any indication of what was wrong. Upon booting, it seemed like someone had attempted a fresh install but had failed to complete installing all the drivers. I figured this was the only problem and set out to install the drivers. Before attempting to get wifi working I checked for the wifi toggle on the case and didn't find one; I then checked in the bios and there was only a disable or use last state option. So I just figured it was on, got driver installed which had option to enable/disable radio. After several driver installs and related utility installs with no luck when scanning for networks I noticed the function key to turn on the wifi. Can't believe I didn't look for it from the start. I knew it wasn't on but continued to repeatedly do something that wasn't working.

Another bite in the ass that I am sure I have received before (although not sure when) is due to gl_ClipVertex not being set in OpenGL shaders. I had a working graphics demo that was using reflections for water and used user-defined clip planes for rendering the reflection. The rendering is based on a scene graph that has shader nodes. Originally the rendering of the reflected image wasn't under a default shader node, meaning it was using the fixed-function pipeline. After improving the scene, everything was changed to use a different default shader, and all of a sudden the reflection wasn't correct. Assuming the change had something to do with the scene-graph, or traversal of it, I spent a bunch of time digging through other code looking for the problem, when it reality it was that I wasn't setting gl_ClipVertex. I have no idea why you would want gl_ClipVertex to be different than gl_Position. But that doesn't matter. All that matters is that I never make this mistake again.