Life goes on. Having less quality online time than usual. Work is busy, and my cable connection at home has been extremely wonky since Saturday or so. It's usually okay in the morning, but as the day progresses it gets harder and harder to maintain a connection. The thing is that the cable modem doesn't seem to be losing the signal, because the activity light is still going a mile a minute, but it just can't find anything, like it's losing track of the DNS. Resetting the cable modem often fixes the problem, but then it crops up again five minutes later (or less). Keeps chopping me off in the middle of IM conversations, too. Tres annoying. Finally called Cox about it Monday night, and the tech support guy cycled something from his end, and it worked better for most of the rest of the evening, but then it was the same old thing last night.
The tech suggested that if it happened again that I should try running the connection directly to the computer, cutting the router out of the equation. I fooled around with that last night, but it had no effect. I checked for viruses and spyware, but the machine was clean. The same thing was happening to the other machine on the network, so I was pretty sure that it wasn't either of those, anyway. I also finally reinstalled Zone Alarm, just to see whether someone was banging away at my ports, and if those break-in attempts were disrupting things. There were about 90 attempted pings and UDP probes overnight, which seemed a lot to me, and I was able to correlate a couple of disruptions to specific UDP probes, so maybe that's it. Bother.
Going to have dinner with Tom and Betsy tonight, so I probably won't have a chance to look at it further until tomorrow.
