The new Ben Harper CD, Diamonds on the Inside, is very cool. After the first track, I was disappointed there weren’t more reggae tunes but he’s such a versatile artist you kind of need the variety to appreciate how talented he is.

Had a weird problem with my WiFi hookup at home

Had a weird problem with my WiFi hookup at home. Some days I’d have perfect connectivity from the living room. Other days it’d be real spotty. The weird thing was that it wasn’t like I had a weak signal. The signal would go from 100% to 0% then back to 100% repeatedly about every 5 seconds. Of course, I ultimately fixed it by trying the obvious solution last. The solutions that did NOT work were disabling all of the cordless phones, adjusting the antennae, turning off WEP, etc. What did work was upgrading the driver on my laptop and the firmware on the access point.

And, the added bonus is that now the built-in wireless bells and whistles with XP are functional. XP keeps track of the wireless networks it has come across. You can configure WEP keys, passphrases, etc. and it keeps track of that hooha for you so can just go from wireless net to wireless net without having to remember the SSID for Starbuck’s or whathaveyou.

Great sailing this weekend

Great sailing this weekend. We moved Dad’s boat (“Ahoy!”) from Eagle Point, where they put it in the water, over to Pier 121. This was the first time I saw her in-person. She’s a 1968(?) Columbia 26 mkII. For the last 34 years, she’s been sitting in Marina Del Rey, owned by the same guy all those years. It’s very different from sailing the J22 for a lot of reasons, but still fun. We didn’t have time to put her through her paces–a storm was moving in. We had a little excitement putting her in the slip. The strong headwind and the boat’s extreme amount of freeboard (and an early turn) caused me to miss the slip. My pride suffered the most damage. I’m looking forward to more spring sailing and some summer evening sails with the fam.

IBM Hopes Toolkit Has Domino Effect
Seeks to ease Lotus developers into J2EE
By David Rubinstein
                                     
April 1, 2003 — In an effort to prevent its nearly 500,000 Lotus Domino developers from jumping from Java to the .NET camp, IBM Corp. in May will release a toolkit designed to simplify development for the Java 2 Enterprise Edition platform, according to a company official.
http://sdtimes.com/news/075/story8.htm