.NET Answers

As I sit down to write this morning, thinking about what I could write that would be valuable to you, the only thing I can think is, “Blah, I have nothing in me.”

But why is this?  Why is it that a person who is normally jazzed about learning new things can suddenly come up dry?

Today, it largely has to do with what happened this past weekend.

It all started when my son and wife came to me informing me that my son could not connect to the network.  This particular computer uses a wireless network connection and has not moved in years.

The specific problem is that the computer can find the wireless connection but generally cannot obtain an IP address via DHCP.  When it can get the IP address, it can’t ping the router.

Here’s what we’ve tried so far:

• Uninstalled and reinstalled the driver software.
• Purchased a new, different brand wireless network card and install it
• Swapped card slots in the computer.

Nothing works.  It still isn’t working this morning and I’ve been working on it since last Thursday.  Next I guess I’ll try moving the router closer to the computer just to see if it is a signal level thing.

The other annoyance is that my RSS feeds aren’t working.  I did a search for this one and found that many people using Microsoft Outlook can not get their feeds to work reliably.  I’ve had trouble in the past with feeds not working, but I’ve never had all of them stop working at the same time.

What is particularly annoying about this is that I really want this setup to work because I have my RSS feeds located in my Exchange OST file.  This allows them to sync up to exchange and push to my WM6 phone.  This means I can read the feeds on my phone OR on my desktop.  But only if the feeds work on my desktop, because it is Outlook that is retrieving the feeds, not Exchange.

So, where to from here?

Unless this post generates a useful fix for the RSS problem, I’m inclined to move email and RSS to some other solution.  It might be Google, it might be some other solution.  But it won’t be Outlook and, sorry, it won’t be Thunderbird either (been there, done that).

Some days, I think I might have been better off sticking with my original major.