Thanks to Sam for picking up some of the slack here (good post).

I’m working like all get out (where in the world did that expression come from?) to get a deliverable out to our favorite friendly neighborhood space agency, and probably won’t come up for air until Tuesday, though I may be able to blog a little on the weekend. Then again, there is the game.

I just got to the airport, and discovered that my driver’s license isn’t in my wallet.

I had to use a company badge for ID, and got a thorough screening in security, and have no idea how I’ll rent a car in LA. Unless Patricia can find it at home and overnight it to me, I may be without a car there. I’ve no idea where it is, though it may be on my nightstand, taken out of my pocket after my last trip.

What a way to start a trip.

[Update in the evening in LA]

Yup. I had taken it out of my shirt pocket, where it resided during my trip home the last time, and put it on my nightstand (where Patricia found it upon getting home from work), and then neglected to put it back in my wallet the next day. She’s Fedexing it to me, so I’ll have a car by Thursday. One useful definition of hell is being in LA sans auto.

The only reason that it was in my shirt pocket, instead of in my wallet, is that under the new idiotic security regime, one never knows when there will be a demand for papers, and it’s more convenient to pull the license out of a shirt pocket than to have to pull the wallet out and dig for it there.

And I don’t currently have a passport because it mysteriously disappeared on a trip shortly after September 11, when I got pulled out of line for a severe screening (for no obvious reason–I’d like to think that it’s because I look sort of swarthy and semitic, but that theory is blown out of the water by the fact that one of my co-screenees was a young blonde woman). I had the passport before the screening–when I got off the plane at the other end, it was gone.

Thanks a lot, Homeland Security!

Heading back to California for another ten days or so. No posting until this evening, if then.

Is there a WPA expert in the house?

I can’t get my (new) Hawking PCI network adaptor to work with it. I’m using WPA-PSK, and I want to use a robust pass phrase, and I do in my D-Link DI-524 router (34 characters), but when I enter it into the client, it lops off everything after the first eight characters. And even when I shorten the phrase to eight characters on the router to get it to match, it still doesn’t work. The options that I have on the PCI adaptor are WPA2 and “Any WPA,” and I have the same problem with both of them. I’d really like to get a wireless network going here, but I don’t trust WEP. (Note, it works fine unencrypted.)

Does anyone have any thoughts?

I’ve been spending the weekend getting stuff working after the hurricane.

I had to reaim the satellite dish, which turned out to be a major PITA, because the mast wasn’t (and has never been) vertical. So I had to shim up the base that it was attached to to get plumb, then reattach the dish, and reaim it. It was still tough, because the elevation indicator seemed to be miscalibrated, but if I’d had to do it with a cockeyed mast, it would have been much worse.

Then I started having computer problems. I have a brand new motheboard, Sempron CPU and gigabyte of DDR 4200 RAM in my main (Windows) machine, and it’s been fine until last night, when I got up this morning to find that it woke up dead. I rebooted, and it came up, sans mouse, and after it was on a while, I started to get strange patterns on the screen af which point it locked up again. After trying this several times, it eventually quit booting at all.

Anyone have any theories? The problem is that this is the first mobo of its generation that I’ve bought, so I’ve got no other processors or memory to swap out to see if they’re the problem. The only thing that I can hope is that the video card has died, which I can test with another.

I’m posting this from my Fedora box, if anyone is wondering. I also have a couple laptops, so it’s not urgent–just annoying.

[Update on Sunday]

I finally got around to playing with this. I swapped out the video card, and it booted right up…

I’ve been spending the weekend getting stuff working after the hurricane.

I had to reaim the satellite dish, which turned out to be a major PITA, because the mast wasn’t (and has never been) vertical. So I had to shim up the base that it was attached to to get plumb, then reattach the dish, and reaim it. It was still tough, because the elevation indicator seemed to be miscalibrated, but if I’d had to do it with a cockeyed mast, it would have been much worse.

Then I started having computer problems. I have a brand new motheboard, Sempron CPU and gigabyte of DDR 4200 RAM in my main (Windows) machine, and it’s been fine until last night, when I got up this morning to find that it woke up dead. I rebooted, and it came up, sans mouse, and after it was on a while, I started to get strange patterns on the screen af which point it locked up again. After trying this several times, it eventually quit booting at all.

Anyone have any theories? The problem is that this is the first mobo of its generation that I’ve bought, so I’ve got no other processors or memory to swap out to see if they’re the problem. The only thing that I can hope is that the video card has died, which I can test with another.

I’m posting this from my Fedora box, if anyone is wondering. I also have a couple laptops, so it’s not urgent–just annoying.

[Update on Sunday]

I finally got around to playing with this. I swapped out the video card, and it booted right up…

I’ve been spending the weekend getting stuff working after the hurricane.

I had to reaim the satellite dish, which turned out to be a major PITA, because the mast wasn’t (and has never been) vertical. So I had to shim up the base that it was attached to to get plumb, then reattach the dish, and reaim it. It was still tough, because the elevation indicator seemed to be miscalibrated, but if I’d had to do it with a cockeyed mast, it would have been much worse.

Then I started having computer problems. I have a brand new motheboard, Sempron CPU and gigabyte of DDR 4200 RAM in my main (Windows) machine, and it’s been fine until last night, when I got up this morning to find that it woke up dead. I rebooted, and it came up, sans mouse, and after it was on a while, I started to get strange patterns on the screen af which point it locked up again. After trying this several times, it eventually quit booting at all.

Anyone have any theories? The problem is that this is the first mobo of its generation that I’ve bought, so I’ve got no other processors or memory to swap out to see if they’re the problem. The only thing that I can hope is that the video card has died, which I can test with another.

I’m posting this from my Fedora box, if anyone is wondering. I also have a couple laptops, so it’s not urgent–just annoying.

[Update on Sunday]

I finally got around to playing with this. I swapped out the video card, and it booted right up…

I got home this morning, and after doing a little rewiring on a phone jack, seemed to get everything up, including DSL.

Driving home from Fort Lauderdale International, I was impressed at the damage. You’ve all heard the expression, “Gee, it looks like a hurricane came through here.” Well, it really, really looks like a hurricane came through here. Lots of dead and uprooted trees, bereft of leaves, toppled palms, skeletons of billboards, piles of debris. And it’s been almost two weeks since the storm. The house is all right, other than a lot of damaged foliage, and screens blown out on the pool patio. Fortunately, the frame is in good shape, so it’s just a matter of screen replacement.

Now to catch up on a couple weeks of business around here.

I’m flying home tonight from LA on a red eye. We got power back last night (ahead of schedule, which was nice), but I don’t know if I’ll have Internet. If I do, I’ll check in tomorrow, and if not, I’ll check in when I do, so if you don’t hear from me, that will probably be why.

I just noticed that I have a very skinny blog, relative to almost everyone else.

No, it hasn’t lost weight–we designed it that way years ago, to be friendly to as many browsers and screen resolutions as possible. It also makes for nice square paragraphs in posts, as opposed to long, wide, spaghetti-ish things like some other people’s posts who I could mention.

But it wastes a lot of real estate on the screen for those using modern, large monitors with high resolution. So, should I do a redesign? (I’m thinking about this anyway, as part of running ads, and establishing some prominent ad space).