Now What?

October 29, 2004 Rand Simberg

Sigh…

My wireless router has stopped talking to my desktop.

But here’s the weird thing. The wireless is fine–I can still access the internet and router through my laptop on that connection, but the desktop is plugged directly into the router via cable, and the router is refusing the connection. When I do an ipconfig, it shows no connection and no assigned IP address. When I unplug the cable, it knows it’s unplugged, and when I plug it back in, all is well again, except it won’t talk to the router.

I’ve tried rebooting the thing several times, with no luck. It just started happening, and I didn’t do anything unusual that might have caused it.

Next thing to try is rebooting the desktop, I guess, which I hate to do because I have a loot of browser windows open that I’ll lose.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, that did it. The ways of Microsoft passeth understanding.

Political Commentary

Pants On Fire

October 29, 2004 Rand Simberg

Senator Kerry lied about releasing his military records, and he as much as admits it to Tom Brokaw (though neither of them realize it). If Brokaw were a real journalist, instead of part of the Democrat cheering section, he would have called him on it.

Political Commentary

Quote Du Jour

October 28, 2004 Rand Simberg

“All you need to know about Arafat was that he insisted on wearing a pistol when he addressed the UN General Assembly. And all you need to know about the UN, I suppose, is that they let him.”

From (who else?), Lileks.

Political Commentary

In The Interest Of Fairness

October 27, 2004 Rand Simberg

From the northern part of my county. The Dems don’t have a total monopoly on nuttiness.

Space Science

A Bust

October 27, 2004 Rand Simberg

That’s what the eclipse is in Boca Raton. Just as it was starting to really happen, it shyly hid behind a thick cloud, and has yet to emerge.

[Thursday morning update]

It wasn’t a total bust. We got some breaks in the clouds during totality. Our biggest problem was staying up late enough. We gave it up about 11:30, while it was still fully in the umbra. It was a beautiful for a while, though.

Political Commentary

Election Violence

October 27, 2004 Rand Simberg

Already.

In my new home town.

…on Sunday night, a student leading a Republican protest at Florida Atlantic University saw her Ford Explorer vandalized by Democrats attending a John Kerry rally. University police responded to the incident and eventually broke it up.

Science And Society

Stealth Killer Comets

October 27, 2004 Rand Simberg

There may be more of them out there than we know:

With about 1 percent of incoming comets ending up on relatively short-period Earth-crossing orbits, it is expected that several thousand dormant comets could be currently posing a potential threat to our planet.

Recent surveys of the Earth’s immediate vicinity should have turned up some 400 such objects, whereas only a handful have so far been found.

The researchers dismiss the current belief that all the “missing” comets have disintegrated into meteor streams. If this had happened, they argue, then we should be seeing a far greater number of meteor showers and a much brighter zodiacal cloud than is observed.

They propose instead that the majority of these comets have become exceedingly black, with such low surface reflectivities that they could not be observed against the blackness of space by optical means.

Space Science