Pings are working again from my blog, I had a rocky week this week. I upgraded to Windows Server 2003 last week – why? Well, it just seemed like a fun thing to do. Plus I know how fast Microsoft dev resources migrate away from old platforms to the new platform, if you want great ongoing help and support you need to bite the bullet and run the latest stuff.

But the upgrade initially hosed me. The IPSEC service failed to load with a really vague error message, and when IPSEC doesn’t load it takes the machine off net. You can turn IPSEC off, but critical services like DNS Client depend on it. For a week I limped along with IPSEC off, and my web server worked, but the machine couldn’t do any client name resolution (among other problems) and so trying to ping DNS names didn’t work.

Thanks to the responsiveness of guys at Microsoft – Dave, Jawad, Stephen, Raymond, David, Osman, and more – we got it figured out. I had installed Port Explorer beta a long time ago and had quit using it. But it installs Winsock providers and these were hanging around on my system – we discovered these by using the sporder.exe tool from the windows platform sdk. On an upgrade to WinServer2003, these make IPSEC unhappy, it refuses to load, and things go to sh%t.

Once I uninstalled Port Explorer, things righted themselves.

I tried to use the online Microsoft support options to get this resolved – the KB, the support forums – but there was no info about, and the folks in the support forum just told me to reinstall. Thankfully the dev teams at Microsoft were super responsive. Thanks much guys!

Microsoft Next-Generation Secure Computing Base - Technical FAQ – OK I don’t totally understand all the features in here but “nexus” sounds all Terminator/Matrix kind of creepy.

OK after a pretty rocky week things should largely be working again on the site. Notably comments should be working, and my server should be pinging all the appropriate sites again.

Comments weren’t working because I had security cranked up on some directories which made it hard for anonymous users to force archive page regeneration when they posted a comment. I relaxed some settings and this should work now. I am not totally happy with the relaxed settings but decided I needed comments and trackback listings to work right. I may make more modifications here in the future.

Escapable Logic:

If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the things that are important to you

From the New Scientist: Young male salmon raised in fish farms mate more aggressively than their counterparts in the wild.

We ate at a premier seafood restaurant in Seattle last night and it was hard to get non-farmed salmon. Out of about 9 salmon dishes, only one was line-caught. Sad. And the menu totally obscures this by calling the farm-raised salmon “Pacific Northwest Salmon” on all the dishes – you have to ask a lot of questions to find out that this is == farm raised Atlantic salmon from farms in BC.

Clear Channel Purchases the FCC – JD’s New Media Musings: June 08, 2003 Archives

Gosh I hope the government stays the course on this – BUSTED LINK – the vendors will whine til the last on this. Next we should advocate for email address portability.

After reading all the great comments on Mitch Kapor’s Weblog re Switching to Mozilla, I decided to try Firebird. It installed nicely and seems really zippy.

One big problem area tho is that I get a really poor experience with Exchange2k Outlook Web Access pages; it could be the server deciding that I am an unsupported client and sending me highly defeatured pages. OWA pages with IE make heavy use of DHTML and so I suspect the exchange server is picky about what clients it supports fully.

A lot of people talking about playing around with EL Wire for halloween effects. Could be fun.

From my Dad – a great one!

In Tennessee, a guy sees a sign in front of a house: “Talking Dog for Sale.”

He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a black mutt just sitting there. “You talk?” he asks.

“Yep,” the mutt replies.

“So, what’s your story?”

The mutt looks up and says, “Well, I discovered this gift pretty young and I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies eight years running.”

“The jetting around really tired me out, and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger and I wanted to settle down. So I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security work, mostly wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings there and was awarded a batch of medals. Had a wife, a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”

The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.

The owner says, “Ten dollars.”

The guy says, “This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?”

The owner replies, “He’s such a liar. He didn’t do any of that shit.”

Hey Satoshi have you tried the Harmony web interface? It is actually amazingly good, it wasn’t hard to use or understand at all.

Now I agree that we can do so much better…all my devices should broadcast their ids using some RF scheme, so that my remote can learn about them dynamically and reconfigure itself on the fly. But the harmony is pretty good, my family is way happier with it than with any previous universal remote.

Hey make an offer on it now before it is gone – Park Place Ltd., Sales Department. I love this car, rides like a dream, but ultimately, it just wasn’t me.

To wit: Last year at Halloween, I was at Home Depot picking up some 10’ lengths of PVC pipe, for my floating lantern project. So there I am in the parking lot, running 10’ lengths of PVC pipe from the front passenger foot well out the left rear window. This made the Jag look really classy.

A guy walks by with his wife, observes my loading, notes the Ohio State alum sticker in my window, and says sotto voce to his wife: “Isn’t that just like a guy from Ohio. He buys the nicest car he can buy, and then he loads it up with lumber.”

Made my day!

My new car is a Chevy Avalanche. Love it, love the fact that it has a fullsize backseat, but can also carry a 4’x8’ sheet of plywood or foamboard or whatever for my Halloween projects. I waffled between the Avalanche and its upscale Cadillac twin, but the guys at the Cadillac dealership made me feel like a sucker: “Why exactly is this better than an Avalanche?” “Oh, it is just better.” That was all I could get out of the guy.

And it is super functional, a much better match for me than…

Eric says:Let’s distill Joel’s piece down even further to make one single piece of advice for how the VC world should change: If you would become a lot more patient about liquidity, you could attract much better portfolio companies.

If you are still playing at being a VC in 2003, you have nothing but patience about liquidity. There is no IPO market, the M&A market is moribund, there is hardly a B and C round market. Patience is all there is left! Which means that all you can do is encourage companies to get to break even, and help them to do so. I am not , on the other hand, very patient about getting a revenue stream going and getting to break even, that is the only path to survival now.