Category: General

Experiencing Technical Difficulties – Translated… Firefox Sucks UPDATE – WTF?

Sorry for the delay in posts.  I have now come to my end with Firefox.  For the 3rd or 4th time now, Firefox all of sudden stops loading one of the websites I go to at a high frequency.  Sometimes it is this blog, sometimes it is my brother’s blog, sometimes it is one of my other popular sites.  It was working fine right before I traveled for Thanksgiving Holidays.  Then I return and it stops loading my blog this time.  It keeps giving Connection Interrupted – Ser…

 I don’t believe this…

I brought up Firefox again to capture the error message and low and behold it works now.  I cannot figure this out at all.  I searched all of the web and got the usual… it is your ISP, it is your Firewall, turn off IPV6 in Firefox blah blah blah.   In the previous times, I had been able to go back to an old restore point and get it to work again.  Unfortunately, this time it was to long and it had rolled off my restore.  So to put things in perspective I:

  • Tried all my restore points
  • Rebooted numerous times
  • Flushed my DNS
  • Released and Renewed my IP
  • Cleared out all caches – cookies and content
  • Reset all of my networking and assigned new IP addresses
  • Yes, I did the stupid turn off IPV6 setting in Firefox
  • Gave up and completely rebuilt my entire machine checking it at every single install to see if it would start working – no luck
  • Reapplied gigs worth of OS patches (thanks Microsoft, I appreciate it)
  • Reinstalled all of my apps
  • Stopped short of kicking my PC through the window when it still didn’t work.

Turns out my friend is having a similar problem with some different sites he is trying to view with Firefox – and yet tonight I write a post about it and magically it is working again.  The only good news about all of this is I have an extremely clean windows install now that I plan to clone so I don’t have to go through this crap again.

 Hope you week was better!

Saturday Night Dead

It appears we need to brace ourselves for supposed Change.  As a result, I’m going on PROMISE WATCH, which basically means I sit back for 4 years and see if a single election promise materializes when one is actually held accountable for actions.  I had to chuckle yesterday as I read about “Obama Girl” demanding favors for her efforts to her candidate elected.  Then the automakers jumped up from the table and started demanding the money they were promised ahead of the vote.  This is definitely going to be interesting, however, I have to send my condolences to the writers at Saturday Night Live.  I honestly have no idea how they are going to survive without having a republican to make fun of every week – although that horse has pretty much been dead for the last 3 years.  And since they’ll never poke fun at “one of their own”, they will simply be left with “smelling cat butt” (Ironically done by Kelsey Grammer a die hard Republican).   Time to change I guess… that being the TV channel off of NBC.

Congratulations and best of luck.

Bad Karma

So, you are probably wondering why the long delay since the last post.  All I can say is I’ve had some serious bad luck during the last week or so.  Let me itemize a few lowlights:

  1. For no apparent reason, my home network starting blocking my brother’s website
  2. After numerous attempts to resolve the situation, I ended up trying to upgrade to IE7 only to have it fail in mid-install which then completely trashed my OS and caused a complete rebuild
  3. I finally go the chance to take a mini snowboard vacation only to have the room above us filled with 8 children that apparently enjoyed running around their room with their ski boots on
  4. I crashed off a rail in the terrain park and must have fallen 4 or so feet horizontally straight onto my back, unfortunately catching my wrist underneath and doing some serious damage to it.
  5. While completing the rebuild of my computer the case fan literally caught fire (flames it all) and nearly torched the inside of the case.  In fact, this is so spectacular, I thought I would include a small picture – notice the melted wire casing and the exposed wires sticking out
    Antec Case Fan Fire
  6. One of my favorite singers passed away today (Jeff Healey).  His Angel Eyes remake was actually our wedding song.

 I was starting to get pretty upset when I decided to look at the week from a different perspective.  As it turns out, these were just a few bad notes in an otherwise good symphony.  In reality, there were a number of positive outcomes from these down moments.

  1. I now know just about everything there is to know about the internal workings of XP networking (hint, be sure and flush the DNS)
  2. I have a completey fresh install of windows which is lean and efficient.  No clutter from forgotten installs and detailed restore points for all major phases of the install
  3. I was up a lot earlier than usual and was able to get some excellent carves in the new powder (4 inches the night before and another 4 inches that day)
  4. Okay, the wrist is still damaged, but I had zero falls on any of the slope runs even though I was pushing it and I was actually able to stick a number of rails and jumps before that incident that had eluded me in previous outings.
  5. The fire actually ocurred when I was home and now I know what case fan to NOT put in my brand new computer which I will begin building tomorrow.
  6. Jeff actually completed a new album before passing away and we are eagerly awaiting its release.  He has left us early, but we will forever enjoy the products of his talents

I am not sure why it is so easy to overlook the brightspots in a given week.  It just might be the bad points tend to sting a little longer and rack up the medical bills.  I’ll be nursing the wrist for awhile longer, but the picture my wife took while successfully doing an earlier rail is already my background picture. 

Next time we’ll just be more selective in our room accommodations and I’ll tighten down the wristguards before catching the rail. 

Upgrade Completed

Good news everyone!  I have finally completed the upgrade to the latest release of WordPress.  All in all, it was not that difficult, but due to a weak FTP client (WS_FTPro) it took a significant amount of time.  I was unable to find an option on the client that allowed deletion of non-empty directories requiring me to manually go through and delete items from each of the sub-directories.  Unless someone knows how to set this in the FTP client I used, I’ll be switching to something more friendly/useable for the future.  Everything has checked out okay and hopefully no one was impacted by the upgrade.

Refocused

Well, good news – my LASIK surgery was very successful and I am extremely pleased – yes, I wish I had done this some time ago, but at least I finally went through with it as a birthday present to myself.  Unfortunately, with working on a computer all day, my eyes need more rest at night until they completely heal – which means I need a little more time before getting back in the blogging mode.  Should be fine by the weekend and excited about writing about all the new things I can see!