30. August 2008 by admin.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing very irregularly, and blaming it on my flaky Internet connection.  It was true: if I felt like writing, I’d look at the lights on the cable modem, and if the connection was down, I’d simply give up.  But late last week, I changed out the cable modem, so now I have no excuse.

Friday was the calm after the storm at work, having gotten a proposal out the door the night before, so I went home early and watched the tube.  The History Channel was showing a series of documentaries about New Orleans and its flood control system on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

It was perhaps ironic that they were showing us about the levees as Hurricane Gustav is now churning through the Gulf of Mexico and, like Katrina three years ago, is taking aim at New Orleans.  At least this time, the city seems to be taking it seriously, with plans underway for a massive evacuation.

Posted in Environment | No Comments »

24. August 2008 by admin.

I’ve been incommunicado this week on vacation in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts.  My wife introduced me to Tanglewood in 2000, before we got married, and we’ve gone there every summer since then, except for last year.  It’s a peaceful place, with rolling hills, interesting museums, and pleasant driving.

We stayed at Vacation Village in the Berkshires.  It’s a development of low-rise apartments in the mountains.  The place was described as having a ‘mountain view,’ but only by technicality: it looked out on the driveway and the buildings on the other side of the street.  It was neat and clean, but the place is apparently run by MBAs: you’re charged $20 to have the maid fix up your room, $50 if you leave a mess, and $150 if you stay beyond the 10:00 am check-out time.  Evidently, the concept of actual hospitality seems to elude them.

There was wireless Internet access in the lobby, but when I tried to sign on to harderworld.com to write a post, it didn’t work.  So I gave up: after all, I’m on vacation.

Posted in Travel | No Comments »

18. August 2008 by admin.

Last week, as a birthday present, my son took me to see the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight. He thought it a motion picture masterpiece, and has razzed me on occasion for not going to see action movies anymore.

So we took an afternoon off from work to see it in Imax. My son was overawed by the Imax presentation, but for me, it was just a movie on a really big screen.

In terms of execution, it was, indeed, a cinematic masterpiece. It was photographed beautifully, was rich in detail, with excellent performances. Heath Ledger, in particular, was chilling as the Joker, perhaps too chilling.

But, in brief, I just didn’t like it. Gotham City is a tired, corrupt place, where all the trappings of civilization are still there, but the underlying premise of civilization–that others have integrity and can be trusted, at least enough to maintain civil order and enable commerce and the exchange of information–has rotted away. There are what appear to be flaming non sequiturs where events simply don’t make sense, until you realize that someone was probably bribed.

And the Joker is a vicious madman. There are some things that I simply don’t understand, and the modern fascination with psychosis as a subject for motion pictures is one of them.  Part of me wonders if Heath Ledger took the character too seriously, to the point where he became the Joker, went mad, and killed himself. Oops: I’m not supposed to say that, for we know that Heath Ledger died from an accidental overdose, having taken five different kinds of pain killers at the same time.

I don’t like movies whose main characters are criminals, unless they commit some extraordinarily clever crime, and I don’t like movies with vicious madmen. And now I wonder if our fascination with such characters has led to the death of a fine young actor.

Posted in Movies | No Comments »

17. August 2008 by admin.

The Internet connection at home recovered a bit in early August, and then got flaky again, being down far more often than it is up.  My wife and son keep odd hours and use the connection when it’s working; I have a cellular modem that I use for business, and avoid idle Web surfing.  It’s a bad habit; almost as bad as watching the tube.

All of our computers are networked, with a wireless network and a shared printer in the living room.  Last night, the Internet connection was down, but I needed to print something.  But when I tried to connect to the network in order to print. the Wi-Fi card in my laptop wouldn’t work.  Not only would it not connect with my home network, I couldn’t see any of the wireless networks in the neighboring apartments.  Indeed, it was as if the wireless card wasn’t even there.

This is not good news: I’m going on vacation this week, out of reliable cell phone range, and need working Wi-Fi.  I tried taking the card out of the computer and reseating it: no dice.

Eventually I gave up and hooked up my computer with the cable that is still under my desk from before I had Wi-Fi, but I was in a really bad mood: I don’t like to fail.

This morning, having contemplated the situation overnight, I was suspecting that Windows had changed something during the last update, yesterday morning.  But there’s a way out: every time it does an update, it records the previous state of the system so that one can roll back the change.  Great!

Except that when I tried it, the rollback failed due to some ‘unspecified error.’  (Yes, the error message actually said ‘unspecified error.’)  Forgive me, but what is the point of saving a restore point if you can’t actually restore to it?

I headed in to work today (my wife is a choirmistress, and she works Sundays), and tried booting my laptop off a Linux CD.  Linux asserted that there was no wireless networking card on the machine, so I sighed, accepted that it was really thoroughly dead, and decided to buy a new one at lunchtime.  I loaded the drivers and it seemed to work, but I don’t use Wi-Fi in the office.

This evening, I prepared to give my new Wi-Fi card an operational test, but found that the internal Wi-Fi was back up.  Indeed, that’s how I was able to prepare this post.

I guess anything can be brought back to service if you swear at it enough.

Does anyone want a new Wi-Fi card?  I’m selling one, really cheap….

Posted in Networking (computer) | No Comments »