How to reinstall the Windows TCP/IP stack

It's been a long time since I blogged anything technical. In my current job I am quite far from technology, which is a drag, but kind of part of the dues of moving along in my career. However, I still get some opportunities to do geeky stuff.

For example, my neighbor just called me with a problem with his Windows XP machine. He had gotten hit with a virus. Norton took care of it, but his browser no longer worked.

I fired up a command prompt and pinged google. I got this:

Pinging www.l.google.com [ºÿ] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
Reply from 64.233.167.99: bytes=32 time=63ms TTL=245
...

Which was kind of what I expected, except for the weird ºÿ characters in the first line. I started to suspect that my neighbor's TCP/IP stack was messed up. In the past, I seemed to remember fixing this by deinstalling TCP/IP and reinstalling it.

But when I went to deinstall TCP/IP, I saw that the "uninstall" button was grayed out. Hmm.

A little research on the Internet (always have a second computer!) revealed a single command that could be used to "reinstall" TCP/IP. It doesn't really reinstall it, it just resets the configuration of it:

netsh winsock reset

After this, Windows asked me to restart. When I went to the signoff login, the "Shutdown" button had a message that stated that shutting down would install a necessary update. I chose to shutdown.

When the PC rebooted, everything worked! There are more details on this technique here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/811259

February Album Writing Month: You're Really Great! (Song #2)

I've actually got four songs written so far (I'm supposed to finish 14 in February; we'll see), but I've only been able to record two more or less successfully. Here is the second one: http://fawm.org/songs.php?id=2436. I'm also putting these up on my MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/timothychenallen.

February Album Writing Month: Naphthalene (Song #1)

After finishing National Novel Writing Month, I was looking for something to do and ran across February Album Writing Month (FAWM). The idea is to write 14 songs in 28 days. I've gotten started on my album (ha ha), which I'm tentatively calling "14 things I f&"@#!d up (and one thing I got right)".

You can see and listen to "Naphthalene" at http://fawm.org/songs.php?id=227.

Charlie's Hash

Over 150 hashers from all over the DC area and beyond got together to celebrate the life of our friend Charlie "Wrong Way" Roberts:

Jingle All the Way 10K: 51:45

A woman I work with, Allison Thompson, got a bunch of us to run in the Jingle All the Way 10K. Our team, Allison Thompson, Natalie Palugyai, Xavier Hughes, Rob Goucher, Deni Taveras, Tami Theiler and I were listed as the Disaster Blasters. It was a lot of fun, though it highlighted for me what I've been coming to grips with for a while: I'm not as fast as I used to be!

NaNoWriMo Day 27: Done! 50,062 Words!

Incredible as it may seem, I managed to finish the 50,000 novel in 27 days. There was a lot of fun in the first three weeks, a lot of moments when the prose just flowed out of me and I was amazed at the ease of the thing. There were moments of uncertainty, but the writing kept it fun, and I eventually was able to come up with a good story arc.

Then the fourth week came, and I started coming to the end of my novel-- 8,000 words too early, This part was painful. The ending point I chose seemed stiff, contrived. And I found myself writing the words THE END three days ago. Which meant I had to go back and invent scenes I had not thought about.

In the end, those were some of the most fun scenes to write. I realized when I got to the end of the book that I had neglected my protagonist's relationship with his parents, so I put in a good number of conversations between them. That was good for at least 4000 words. I also realized that my character had about a month during Christmas Break from the Naval Academy when he had nothing to do. So I put him on restriction and had him sit around and talk to the rest of the criminals. The book is not about me, but this was pretty similar to when I was on restriction for Thanksgiving my second class year-- again, I want to emphasize that the book is not about me. Honest.

I should emphasize something: no one in their right mind would write a novel in 30 days. I know that. Real Writers would not even attempt a first draft in 30 days. But I also know me well enough to know that I needed to do this in 30 days or I would not get it done.

So here's to my novel. I don't know if anyone but me will ever read it (that is, I may not let anyone else read it). But there's a lot of me in that thing.

One thing I'm sure about: I'm pretty sure I'm going to try again next year.

NaNoWriMo Day 24: 40,000 words!

Today is quite a milestone. I just passed 40,000 words and am well within my goal word count. Apparently the last 10,000 words are pretty much of a slide. I'm thinking about when I ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 1991, though. I finished off the first 20 miles and realized I had 10,000 meters to go, and thought how nice it would be to stop right then.

One difficulty is that I already know what the last two scenes in the book are going to be. So my options are starting to get limited for new scenes for my actors. But I've found finding that every aspect of this exercise so far has somehow made me squeeze out some new aspect of writing, and I expect that this restriction will make me do just that as well.

NaNoWriMo Day 23: 38,839 words

Night before last, I sat up until 3AM and finally caught up my word count-- in fact I got an entire day ahead. Tonight I realized that I was going to fall behind again, so I bit the bullet. When Sònia went off to bed, I stayed up and made myself write until I was caught up again.

I actually think I'm going to make it. I think I know how the book is going to end, although I am not discarding the idea of some new plot twist injecting itself at the eleventh hour.

I can't express what an awesome experience this has been so far. I have had to dredge up memories I had not thought about for ages. Parts of the book are starting to connect together in weird, magical ways. I'm also starting to really notice the craft of other writers-- I was reading a passage from The Lord Of The Rings the other night and was struck by how much of what Tolkein wrote had nothing to do with moving the story forward and everything to do with setting up environment and helping develop the characters.

I've gotten so cocky that I told my dad about writing this thing and he offered to edit it. My initial reaction was to accept but internally reject this idea-- I mean, what's my dad going to say about all the parts that involve genitalia? But then I thought, how many guys get to do something like this with their dads. So I guess the first person who will read my book will be my dad, if I finish it. Which I will.

NaNoWriMo Day 19: 29,060 words!

This morning I was getting ready for work and saw that today was the 19th.  Which means (yikes!) only 11 days until the end of National Novel Writing Month!  I managed to catch up a little over the weekend, which was good.  My writing session in Annapolis was shorter than I wanted it to be.  I spent a lot longer than I had expected looking over the Academy grounds.  So little has changed there in 21 years!

I've been doing some minimal sketching out of the plot and leaving un-written some of the passages that just serve to connect more interesting passages.  This is paying off.  The story is flowing along nicely.  I really understand what writers mean when they say that the book takes on a life of its own.  There have been several times when I've decided to take a character in a new and different direction only to find that details of the story up to that point support the change.  It feels like someone else is planning out the book for me.

This weekend I had dinner with my old Glee Club director from the Academy, Dr. John Barry Talley, and his wife, Marcia Talley.  We were talking with a group of other alumni from the glee club about a bar in Annapolis, and I found myself saying, "oh, thank god you know the name of that place, I'm using it in my book."  My book.  How very weird.  Marcia Talley is a renowned published writer, and she looked over at me and beamed proudly when I said that.

NaNoWriMo Day 15: 22,547 (halfway day)

In theory my word count should be at 25,000, but I'm feeling pretty good about this. Almost all of my story takes place in Annapolis, and I'll be taking a trip up there tomorrow to meet up with some of my old friends from the Glee Club and Dr. Talley, the director who just retired after 35 years. So I should have some time to get some writing done tomorrow while I'm there, and maybe research a couple of the bits where my knowledge of The Yard has gotten foggy.

I finally took a few minutes (I'm talking like five minutes here) to outline the rest of the story. I'm not 100% committed to all elements yet, but I kind of have an idea of what points the storry will be building towards now. I have the whole semi-plan written out in BIG HONKING CAPITAL LETTERS at the end of the novel so far.

One bit of advice I got today was to leave aside all of the connecting passages and concentrate on the juicy bits that drive the story forward. The connecting stuff can stand as some instructions ("AFTER THIS X LEAVES THE PARTY AND SOMEHOW GETS TO Y'S HOUSE WHERE THEY WILL HAVE A FIGHT") that would be fixed in editing. I'm going to try that tomorrow and see what happens.