Technical Difficulties

Technical Difficulties Continue

Update 2

April 12, 2006

As I suspected things were abnormal when I got back to my home computer. Blogger wouldn’t load. I finally managed, after waiting 45 minutes, to get the following screen with the “Blog This” button (needless to say, I couldn’t do anything with it, and I am now out of ideas):

Update 1

April 11, 2006

After jumping through the usual voice mail hoops, Verizon connected me to a very capable and very polite young man named Colin. After verifying my connection speed and connection goodness, he seized, remotely, control of my computer and poked around, basically confirming that everything was in order and that, in fact, I was in the throes of Mystery.

He offered one clue: that I had many processes running, so I pursued that angle for several hours, deleting processes and programs. Finally, resorting to such things as booting only with network support, I was once again at the same place. Firedoglake won’t and neither will Blogger.

There was one absolute desperation measure left: install Service Pak 2. Knowing that I would immediately be unable to boot normally, I gritted my teeth and began the odious process. Since a normal boot would not work after installation, I went into safe mode and tried Blogger again. Sigh. The Mystery deepens.

I then uninstalled Service Pak 2. (Tip: Add/Remove Programs is the way to go here.) I had little hope of anything happening after the uninstall, but what the heck, I tried Blogger again, and, you guessed it, Ta-Da, I was able to create a post! Oh, joy, joy, happy, happy. I still couldn’t get the “Read more” link to work at Firedoglake but it was a miracle, nevertheless.

I quit while ahead in the wee hours of the morning. Will I be able to blog tonight? Only time will tell, but whatever happens, the Mystery remains.

Original Post

Ok, I’m officially mystified. No matter what I do I can’t post from my home computer. I have replaced my router, deleted cookies, cleaned caches, run spyware and virus scans, rolled back the computer, and burned chicken guts on an alter of PC Gamer disks under a full moon, and I still can’t access certain web sites, such as the most important one—http://blogger.com, which, of course, means I can’t post anything. (All my recent posts have been done from another computer.)

This problem has persisted now for over a month. Google has been no help since I can’t seem to get their attention.

My next stop is a fearsome call to Verizon DSL support, which I means I’ll be on the phone an hour telling them that “yes, I’ve already done that.” I am not confident they will be of any help either, though some sort of connection issue seems to be the only semi-logical answer.

Here’s another odd example of the problem of having: firedoglake.com. I can load the home page fine but if I click on any link then the target page won’t load.

If anyone who reads this has any idea of what is going on, please leave a comment and give me a clue.