I hope skipping a day isn't going to become a habit. Like anyone cares.

A show I enjoyed to some degree last season has premiered once more. Of course, I don't have cable TV no more so I didn't watch it. But when I found out it had premiered I brought it up on Hulu.

The show is called Dollhouse, the latest Joss Whedon creation. That's the main reason I tried to watch it consistently. Whedon's shows, at least the episodes he writes anyway, are always the best.

Unfortunately Hulu and/ore my browser and/or my computer seem to be having some issues today so I may or may not make it through this season 2 episode.

It seems at random I lose my network connection. I use the little right-click menu and tell it to repair, which is does.

For some reason on Hulu even when the buffer reports to be "Full" I'll push play and it will immediately say "buffering" and stay like that for several minutes. So why does it say full then? I don't know even know. Obviously the buffer isn't full if it needs to buffer.

I am course using Firefox Portable for my browsing needs. Makes moving from PC to PC and re-install to re-install so much easier as all my book marks and plugins/extensions are conveniently already installed and ready to go. But I think it collects entirely too many flash and flash-related files and that some how starts to have unfortunate side-effects. Perhaps I'll try loading this episode in the dreaded IE 8 (which is good for all I know, never bothered really trying it).

Now, about my network: I don't know if I've talked about it before but I'll re-cap anyway. The cable modem is out in the living room near the larger TV (having no cable TV it's not used a lot these days). I tried for literally years to get internet into my room and my main desktop PC in particular with only limited results. Then I bought one of those ethernet-over-power kits for $100 or whatever. So the cable modem connects to the little netgear router, the router goes out to among other things the little "wall wart" and that connects to a second "wall wart" in my bedroom.

That wall wart goes into a normal consumer-grade switch which conveniently serves my desktop, media extender and "server" where all my media and other stuff is stored away along with any other device I happen to feel like connecting via eithernet.

So there are in fact several layers of possible failure points, aren't there. Add to that my current desktop PC has two onboard NICs (not sure why) and one of them has already decided to stop working and you really have an "easy" issue to sort out.

Of course so far simply doing a "repair" on the connection via windows has fixed it. But who knows what's going on. The other NIC could be going bad, could be a network cable, could be the switch, could be one or both of the wall warts have decided the warranty is up and therefore it's time to stop.

Oh, and that ethernet-over-power technology is very tempermental. It's really blind luck that even made the things work to begin with. Maybe theirs just noise in the electrical wiring or something, I don' tknow.

The last time it the network apaprently went down I did ask my room mate who was just using a direct wifi connection to the router and he said the internet worked perfectly fine for him. In other words I can probably rule out the router directly. That just leaves the wall warts, the cabling and everything else on my side of the equation.

So far it's just a minor, temporary inconvenience. I can only hope it just grow into anything beyond that.

I suppose what I could do is just have a copy of a very minimal, hardly used firefox portable stored away and then make a copy of that folder every time I need to do any viewing, or at least any time I'm having difficulty Hulu or whatever. Then delete that folder when I'm done with it. I have no idea if that would work

I have no idea if I mentioned this minor detail either, probably did: in August, after years of complaining, my landlord/roommate and I finally called Comcast and insisted they run some kind of test on the modem from their end. Which they did. And decided apparently there was something wrong with our cable modem and could we please go to the local office and pick up a new cable modem. And yes, yes we could.

So I suppose we could just have a bad cable modem. I mean it wouldn't be the most unheard of thing after all. Ironically I never had these random connection issues , I don't think, prior to this new cable modem. So figure that one out.

Ok I've probably went on and on without saying anything long enough now maybe I should move on. I also don't remember if I have mentioned the new series of books I've been reading by one John Scalzi. I've read his "old man's war" trilogy and have recently begun reading "Zoe's Tale" though since it is the same story as the third book of old man's war (the last colony) I'm not nearly as excited to read it as I was to read the main three. In that I've had it a few days and it's not done. Those books are really incredibly well written and well paced that it's easy to read a lot to all of any one of those three without hardly realizing it.

Oh, now I remember what I really wanted to talk about: should I go to Hawaii? I mean why would an unemployed person living on government checks *possibly* hesitate to leave for Hawaii for a week? I mean I'd never have time off other wise sure.

There is one minor wrinkle though: I'd be going with my mom and her live-in husband-like-guy, not by myself. So ya, I'd feel like "that guy" who still goes on vacation with his mom at the age of 30. On the other hand when am I possibly going to go to Hawaii (or any place else for that matter) outside of such an offer. Although if that week falls on a unemployment-is-due week then I suppose the post marks may or may not be noticed by the California government, right? Maybe I'll get a call from some one saying "...did you uh...go to Hawaii recently?" to which I'll reply "why would I do that? That just rediculous...". Or something. Ok maybe they have so many forms coming they really don't have time to track them all down. I don't know.

Anyway I've resisted my Mom's offer of a heavily discounted trip to Hawaii for a while now but the idea is actually growing on me. Hopefully no one from the state is reading this and/or knows how to figure out who I am. By the way I love you state...

For the record I've still remained non-commital for the trip. I haven't actually gone on any trips.

It might clash with my planned one-day job anyway. The one at the end of october. The one whose contact still hasn't called or written back despite both an email and a voice mail. Ya, that one. It was friday though. Guess I should be more patient, eh?  ¶ 8:20 PM