A few months ago we added a G3 350 iMac to our home network. Ever since then, we started seeing network blips, where our WRT54G would occasionally reset itself. It didn’t happen often enough to see a correlation. Over time it got worse, but not debilitatingly so, but we’d managed to suspect the Mac was at fault. Since the WRT54G had a real bad habit of “losing” its static WAN IP setting whenever it blipped, we went out and replaced it with a new WRT54GS. Things seemed to get somewhat better though not completely; there was still periodic problems when the Mac was being used.

Well, the user of the iMac went away for a week, came back, rebooted — which kicked in an update to MacOS 10.4.10 — and the network started having fits, the WRT54GS resetting itself every three minutes to the point that nothing of any practical value could be done on the network as connections kept getting hosed. The short-term solution was to pull the Mac from the network (though the problem was pronounced most when the Mac was surfing).

Over the next day or two I wracked my brain trying to think up options. I didn’t want to get a new router. I considered hubbing the network between the modem and the router, hooking the Mac straight into the hub (we have a spare IP from our ISP). But I couldn’t find my hub. I did find our old BEFSR41. And I thought, just for fun, why not see if the BEFSR41 hooked into the network will at least isolate the Mac’s damage to a second subnet.

So I wired the BEFSR41 straight into a free port on the WRT54GS, set it up as 192.168.2.* (instead of 1.*), and plugged the Mac into that.

It all works great now. I don’t know why. And I don’t dare update the FW on the second router.

The model names are all Linksys home routers. WRT54G is a 4-port wired/wireless device, as is WRT54GS; the latter claims to have some sort of enhanced speed. BEFSR41 is a wired-only 4-port device.

MoveOn.org just sent out an email lambasting unnamed “Democrats In Name Only” (DINOs), specifically those who are retreating from the fight to end the Iraq War.

In the U.S. party system, where no candidate is actually held to an ideology, and more often than not, positions on issues frequently tend to fall randomly into either party, and the parties’ positions have in some cases swung drastically over time, what exactly does it mean to be a Democrat? Does it really mean anything? Does the fact that progressives have cast their lot with the Dems really mean that Dem = progressive?

No, and this is one of the top problems with U.S. politics. Neither party is really dedicated to a particular political segment. Ideological segments have cast their lot with particular parties (usually, of course, in reaction to the segments that have cast their lot with the other), and those parties’ interest in maintaining that support is what drives them to appease them, but only enough to entice that support to stay tenuously on their side.

The U.S. Democratic party is not a liberal party, and the Republican party is not a conservative party. The parties reflect what their most valuable supporters stand for, but the parties themselves don’t stand for anything.

The third parties do, of course; but that doesn’t do any good in the U.S. team-oriented system. In much of the rest of the democratic world, a party stands for something, and you vote for the party that best stands for what you stand for. In the U.S., you pick whichever party is most likely to want your support and show it by appeasing you. Or, increasingly, by scaring you about how “bad” the other party is.

It means nothing to be a Democrat or a Republican. It’s just a team, and many people seem to choose the team they think will win rather than the team they think will make things better or do what they want. It does mean something to be a Green, or a Libertarian (sort of), but in U.S. politics, that has no cachet.