I’m having problems with the network card on my desktop (XP).  The quick fix is to reboot my computer and hope it doesn’t happen again anytime soon.  But after spending more than an hour trying to figure out the exact cause this weekend, I am out of ideas.  My roommate had this problem before upgrading from XP, only it would happen anytime the computer was on for more than about 4 hours.  Aside from the operating system, the only similarity I can think of is that we both use TrendMicro (version 8 when he had the trouble, versions 8 and 10 when I had the trouble).  However, I had successfully used this computer for more than a year with TMSC 8 before the problem started.

The symptoms:

• The computer will be working fine for hours or days, until suddenly all http traffic fails to successfully load.  I can ping other computers and on- and off-campus servers (Google being my favorite), I can check email using Thunderbird, but I cannot get any webpages to load in either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• the ARP table doesn’t seem as full as it should be.  I compared between my laptop and desktop (connected to the same switch), and the desktop had only the gateway for the subnet I’m on, while the laptop had several other local IP addresses.
• I can’t enable the wireless network card, nor can I disable the Ethernet card.
• I disabled the Windows Firewall (I left the TrendMicro firewall up), but this did not fix the problem at the time.

Some solutions I’ve seen on the Internet but haven’t tried yet:

• from: http://beer234.blogspot.com/2008/10/port-80-blocked-windows-xp.html
  Restart the Windows XP PC in Safe Mode.
  Run Regedit.exe to open the registry editor.
  Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetServicesvsdatant
  Click start in the right pane and modify the value to 3.
  Restart the PC and port 80 should no longer be blocked and you can use http with any browser.

“28 Days Left in the Semester”, the dry erase board read.  Every day I pass by it, I’m reminded that counting down until you leave a place for forever isn’t the way to live.  Graduating and job hunting is scary business.

I was walking to class about a week ago just as the sun was peaking out above the power plant.  We must have had a nice freeze, because all the cars in the lot had beautiful patterns of frost crystals spread across them.  I’ve never seen sublimation before in the wild, so to speak, but as the sun hit the ice crystals on those cars, the ice didn’t melt but instead turned to steam and drifted up.  It was really weird to see steam coming off of cold, parked cars when the air was cold enough for me to see my own, heated breath.
I wish I had taken a picture.