Tuesday. Awake and up fifteen minutes before the alarm was set to pop, to breakfast and the papers for an hour and a half and then back to the apartment. Feeling good, I must admit, although my computer has seemingly gone south. None of the browsers will resolve a web site, although the Ethernet card reports sending and receiving packets, I can FTP files up to my web site and ping outside locations at a DOS prompt. Well, I thought. That seems a bit odd. I checked the connection setup and found the static IP information had flipped back to automatically getting an address through DHCP, so I corrected that. Still didn't work.

What's changed since this morning? It worked briefly before I set out for breakfast. The computer time was two hours off. The Photo Mechanic software I use to bring image files into the computer from the camera cards launches a splash screen, but then waits until the system gives me an error message saying the program has timed out. Reinstalling Photo Mechanic doesn't help. And that's it. Everything else seems to work. So I fired up the laptop that connects to the internet through the wireless router I have mounted up on a bookcase. Uses the same internet connection, of course, and the browsers on the laptop work just fine. So it's my damned Windows 7 box.

So I thought I'd go out for a walk and let it sit for a couple of hours and see if the problem was being caused by something at my ISP and ended up hopping a bus downtown, walking through the Old Oakland area, through Chinatown, then back up Broadway and along Grand home. Plenty of exercise for the day, feeling good now two days in a row, hup! hup! and all that. Exercise, an ice cream cone and a slice of cheesecake at a corner Chinese bakery. For lunch. I'm going to think about what I've been having for lunch lately, but not now.

OK, I'm back, check the broken computer connections. It still fails. I think it's going to mean a complete reinstall of the system. Which is depressing. What exactly went wrong? RAM? Hard drive? Phase of the moon? Could be. The moon, anyway. The thing will transfer files through FTP, so it's seeing the outside world, but it won't resolve a web site. Any web site. I can ping. Ping! Ping! Ring-a-ding. Life in the computer age. Is getting old here in Oakland.

Later. We'll play some more guitar and then get some sleep. This computer will need reinstalling the operating system and all of its software, but we'll think about that tomorrow after getting the various doctor visits and my guitar lesson done. I have no idea what happened, hope this is a one time thing.

Addendum. Windows 7 has a restore feature that's a little different than the earlier versions I'm familiar with and I was able to restore to a version that was saved a week ago. Everything now works. I am relieved. What has happened in this last week, in this last day that might have caused the problem? I'm looking at a Microsoft update that installed this morning. I am.

So life proceeds. Yesterday I was playing with that idea of putting up a page of doors, storefronts and the like and did some experimenting. Maybe it will get me to be more serious. Might. You never know. I don't, anyway.