Codex Alera

Received an email late last night from Amazon telling me that my copy of Princeps Fury is on the way, expected arrival date 12/1. Cool!

Now, back to fighting with the home PC. After about 15 minutes online some process related to dial-up networking crashes and I lose my Internet connection. The funny thing is that everything looks OK but nothing works. Playing with the Sysinternals Process Monitor trying to track it down now.

I thought that it might be a problem with Firefox. The last thing I did before the problem started was upgrade to Firefox 3. So, I uninstalled that and re-installed Firefox 2. That didn't help. It doesn't matter whether I use IE or Firefox, I lose communication. Although, I did notice that while examining the event logs that M$ Help and Support Center still had Internet access.

Watching Process monitor, I noticed that the last thing to happen before the crash was that Firefox was making calls to WMP. I looked thru the Firefox options, and Firefox was set to call QuickTime dll's for nearly all Media functions. I changed those to Irfanview and WinAmp, we'll see if there is any difference.

Just happened, "Faulting application svchost.exe, version 5.1.2600.2180, faulting module unknown, version 0.0.0.0, fault address 0x001f1cb0." But Firefox is still functional to some degree, or at least it says that it saved this post. Guess I'll find out in a moment.

The only way I have found so far to recover is to reboot the PC. The svchost crash takes out a whole list of services; I still haven't figured out how to manually restart them.

Yah, it is still functional. I feel fairly certain that when I click the "Close" button on the error message my connection will die, here goes

Later:
Had to go spend some time deer hunting. Now I'm back at the PC. Matt and I need to make a bunch of sausage. I bought a $30 sausage stuffer at L&M that was a piece of garbage. It was so poorly made that all the sausage would blow back out the back instead of going into the tube. THEN I started to do a little research, looks like to get a decent sausage stuffer (i.e., one that works) you need to spend a couple hundred bucks. Ouch. Maybe we will continue making sausage patties. I did find one sausage stuffer that looks neat for under $200, it includes parts for making Jerky as well. It's water powered, hook your garden hose to it and go. Although, in searching for reviews it sounds as though many people have modified theirs to work with air pressure instead, not as messy. I haven't seen any complaints about it yet. www.dakotahsausagestuffer.com.

Well, I'm still waiting for the connection to die. This time I have been on for 35 minutes and my connection is still alive, I'm rather surprised. Too good to be true? Maybe.

I really should get busy helping Matt. Temps are now (11:30 AM) pushing 30ºF, and we have been storing the venison in the back of Stripez for the last couple of days. Don't want it to thaw before we can finish cutting it up and get it into the freezer.

Matt's screaming at me know, better go. 40 minutes and haven't lost connection yet.

It crashed at almost exactly 45 minutes, suspiciously close. After reboot I will log on with a different account and see if it does the same thing.

I'm trying to upload a jpg of the error messages. The first came at about 45 minutes, the second one appeared at 60 minutes. I have not totally dropped the connection, but just now at 75 minutes the first error has come up again. DUN appears to still be functional and I have not yet totally lost the connection.

Connection is still going. I have not closed any of the three error messages, I just moved them off the side of the screen. So far I'm at 90 minutes.

Well, I'm going to "ok" the error messages now. bye-bye!