Maybe...

... I spoke to soon. The Red Sox not only swept the Phillies this past weekend, they thumped them. Phils never came close, losing 8-0, 7-1, and 12-8, or, cumulatively 27-9. Even if the Phillies make the playoffs it looks like when they face a good team they won't stand a chance.

Wild

I'm still at the shore and have snuck away for a bit to McDonald's to get on the Web.

I noticed that the Phillies, right now, are the Wild Card leader in the N.L. Forty-five days ago, I was hoping they would give Charlie the boot. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I was right. September is still a long way off.

Hotspot

As I write this I am sitting in a McDonald's in Ortley Beach, NJ. For $2.95 I get a two hour block of Wi-Fi and I don't have to buy any McDonald's food to sit here. I found this place listed on http://intel.jiwire.com. Apparently, lots of McDonald's are offering Wi-Fi.

The ocean water is cold. Last I checked it was 63 at Atlantic City, which is south of here so I wouldn't be surprised if it's just barely topping 60 here.

Board

For the past 18 months, or so, my wife's PC has been acting up. At first, we thought it was the OS (W98) so we reinstalled it. After each reinstall, it worked fine for a while. Eventually, I thought it must be hardware-related. I checked all the attached devices and figured it must be the motherboard. I ordered one through Ebay and installed it yesterday. It works better now; at least it boots up. I can't get the old 600MHz processor to work with it even though the manual says it can support up to a 600MHz PIII. The board came with a 400MHz PII processor attached and that works OK so I'll leave good enough alone for now.

Router

The router I ordered on Tuesday arrived on Thursday. I ordered from Newegg.com. The router came from NJ so they must have a distribution center there, hence the quick arrival. Newegg is my e-tailer of choice when I need to order stuff. I also use Pcimicro.com for cheapie stuff like NIC's and cables. I found Pcimicro from using Pricewatch.com.

Anyway, I ordered the same router that I had before (Netgear RP614) but they changed the design. The new one is white, has a different stand, a different power supply, and in the settings there are some new options. Since they changed the power supply, I could not try the new power supply in the other router to see if it's the router or the power supply. By the way - the modem didn't fry, just the power supply so I'm thinking the power supply on the old Netgear RP614 may have been toasted, too. The lightning strike did, however, blow out the NIC in my main desktop (I had a few extras around - I always try to have backups of most things, especially mice, keyboards, NIC's, hard drives, monitors, video cards, cables, etc). Luckily, nothing else on the desktop PC was fried.

The router was a little stubborn when I set it up. Even though it's set to use DHCP, it didn't want to assign any new IP addresses; after it assigned x.2 to my server, it would not assign x.3 to my desktop; when starting the network on the desktop, it would just hang. So, I tried letting it assign x.2 to the desktop and stopped and started the network on the server and it hung again. I even rebooted and it hung on the reboot. The router has an option to assign a MAC address to an IP so I did that. After I let it assign x.2 to my server and I set x.3 to the MAC address of the desktop, the router picked it up and it then had no problem issuing x.4, x.5, and x.6 addresses. For some reason, the x.3 had to be set manually. The other router wasn't so finicky, I would just plug stuff in and it would give it an IP address.

Zapped

Some strong storms moved through our are yesterday afternoon. About 3:30 I heard two very loud, quick sounds that sounded like gunshots right outside the window; lightning strike. I don't know what it hit but it knocked out the phone line and a surge must have come through the cable and fried both the cable modem and the Netgear router. I guess the surge must have gone from the modem through the Cat-5 cable and killed the router, but I don't think any of the NIC's were damaged in the computers. The router must have absorbed what the modem passed onto it. The surge did not go through the power lines because the power still worked and the surge protector itself works fine, too. Ugh. I could see no damage do the house nor any down lines outside. So, I have no Internet at home at least until Wednesday morning when RCN comes out to swap out the modem. I have no idea if the outside equipment was fried too. However, the phone started working again this morning but the appointment for the phone was Wednesday so maybe they came today or fixed it remotely. I bought another router through Newegg.com and that probably won't arrive until early next week. Hopefully, I'll just need a modem swap and that no equipment outside is damaged or, if it is, it can be fixed or replaced quickly.

WWII Weekend

I met my friend Scott yesterday for the WWII Weekend Air Show in Reading. We saw a good assortment of planes, weapons, and reenactors. I posted the pictures I took here . The B-17 (Yankee Lady) really does fly and you can book a flight for $400. I would like to do that one day.

hda II

Well, I don't know what happened but the 60 GB hard drive that died on me is working ok. I tried to reinstall Arch on it but, for some reason, once I had the base install finished, I got the same errors. So, as a test, I installed Fedora Core 2 on the drive and, so far, so good. I wonder if the partitioning tool with Arch did something to the drive. I think I'll stick with FC2 for a week or two. It's not as bad as I thought. Getting the Java and Mplayer plug-ins to work in Firefox under Fedora is a little work but I did it. I certainly like Arch's package manager more than Fedora's though. Next up: switching my laptop to Fedora (FC4?) and then getting back to Arch on my desktop.

I did install FC2 on the two small drives (8.4 and 1.6) and after a day a heard some loud clicking and got an error referring to hdb which was the 8.4 GB drive. So, it looks like that one is done.