I wanted to try playing at Bodog. Their client sofware worked for awhile. Then they upgraded it. And it stopped. It seems that they don't offically support windows 98se. So I upgraded to windows 2000 pro (Yes, I know. I'm a luddite.), through the power of ebay.

OK, great. So after I screw around with my windows 2000 for a few days, it pretty much works. (For some reason the install resurrected an Nvidia driver for a card I used a year ago. Every time I accessed the File menu in an explorer window or right-clicked the desktop, the shell restarted.)

Today Conner was banging on my guitar, and I thought it would be a good idea to print out "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and encourage him in that direction. But I hadn't set up my printer. Now, I hate printers in general, but I make a special exception for my HP laserjet4, because, well, it prints things and doesn't bother me much. So I download the win2k driver, but the windows "Add printer" business doesn't work. So I try the whiz-bang HP find network printer.

Here's a capture of the network traffic:

No. Time Source Destination Protocol Info
1 0.000000 192.168.123.186 192.168.123.102 ICMP Echo (ping) request
2 0.002050 192.168.123.102 192.168.123.186 ICMP Echo (ping) reply
3 0.016913 192.168.123.186 192.168.123.102 SRVLOC Attribute Request
4 0.019561 192.168.123.102 192.168.123.186 ICMP Destination unreachable (Port unreachable)
5 3.034740 192.168.123.186 192.168.123.102 SRVLOC Attribute Request
6 3.037424 192.168.123.102 192.168.123.186 ICMP Destination unreachable (Port unreachable)

For those of you blessed with an ignorance of TCP/IP, I'll translate into English.

PC: Hello?
Printer: Yeah.
PC: Tell me what you can do.
Printer: Piss off.
PC: Tell me what you can do.
Printer: Piss off.

So it turns out, according to HP's website, I need to upgrade the firmware in my printer. There's a handy little application that does this. It runs in windows 98 but not windows 2000. (I'm not making this up.) Luckily, there's also a horribly complex java client/server tool for managing a business sized network which also does it. (I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me to use one of the other two computers, which are still running windows 98.) So after much clicking, I upgrade the firmware, use the network printer winter, print the test page, and there is much rejoicing.

Conner is done playing guitar.

:seizure:

My printer recently fixed itself.

just reminds me of the great fun I am (still) having trying to install a POS Lexmark on my Linux system.

It can grep it. That's about it.