More computer joy

So, following advice, and because I know I needed to do it really, I downloaded service pack 2 for my laptop computer.

First time round, it failed to install properly. So, when I turned the computer on, I was told that it was unstable, and that I should uninstall it "or contact my administrator".

Curiously, my administrator was not on call, so I took plan 1.

This caused untold havoc. Somehow, over an hour or two, I managed to piece things back together. I even succeeded in installing Service Pack 2.

But then something odd happened. Although I could get online via my wireless connection, I couldn't get online via the Local Area Connection 4. I got the message "network did not assign a network address to the computer". Helpfully, it offers you a "Repair" button. Unhelpfully, this doesn't work.

So, of course, I googled it. One person had suffered a similar problem. The responses were Greek to me. It's like algebra at school. Or electricity diagrams. There's something about networks that defeats me. Then again, I think that they defeat most computer guys too. But they adopt a man in white coat syndrome, blunder around for a few hours, and eventually get it to work somehow. But the fact is THEY ARE JUST TOO FUCKING COMPLICATED.

I tried typing ipconfig after clicking "run", but the DOS screen just appeared and instantly vanished. No one mentioned that that might happen.

I should be grateful that the wireless works, I guess. And I am sure that there are simple reasons why the wireless works but the wired connection doesn't. What I'd like is a simple means to fix it that doesn't entail wasting six hours of my life.

And you know what. A pound to a penny it's something to do with Mac Addresses going wrong.
Except it will all be my fault, 'cos it's never the computer's. Oh no.


Update: Went into Vista computer. Disabled MacAddress filtering. Wired Connection from laptop now works fine. There's a surprise. Checked MacAddress matched National SemiConductor Corp DP83815 /816 /10/100 MacPhyter PCI Adaptor (WHY DO THE NAMES ALWAYS HAVE TO BE SO FUCKING LONG?) and it does. So why should the connection suddenly stop working? Because it's all shit, put together bny a million different monkeys in a million different places, so that one small change (well, a big change, upgrading to Service Pack 2 (I've worked out why they give them long names, it's so they can then givem them shorter names that no-one understnads, like DNS, and SP2) causes untold numbers of problems elsewhere.

So, I can disable macaddress filtering, and the laptop then gets assigned a network address. But if I turn macaddress back on, and then turn my laptop off and back on again, once again it can't assign a network address, even though the macaddress filter is the right sequence of letters and numbers. So it seems to me that my only option is to go back to the way I was before (turn off all filtering shit and let someone leech my network), or never use a ired connection on the laptop, or have to go into the Belkin hom thingy and manually turn macaddress off if I ever want to do it, remembering to turn it back on at the end. Isn't life great?



What a waste of man hours security shit is. Why not just trust in people's honesty? Or shoot them if they transgress? It's really a waste of a fucking life sorting out this shit.


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Whither prices

The markets are behaving strangely at the moment, and I suspect that the basic reason is that, although most people agree about what is going to happen (with a significant minority of dissenters), there is no consensus about when it is going to happen or what is the best thing to do about it.

So, the majority now seems to be in the Birks camp of "inflation is coming". This is despite masses of deflationary data being released in the past couple of months. Thus we have the perverse effect fof deflationary/depressionary data being released in the US, but the markets rise and gold goes up in price, because, the sagemeisters conclude, this will force the US to pump even more money into the economy, which will in the long run be inflationary.

However, there are two opposing camps to this.

The first says "sure, inflation is coming, but the markets are tanking now. On top of that, quantitative easing will keep up the demand for bonds. The Fed is not going to buy equities with all that fiat shit it is printing!" And so the price of bonds/gilts remains high and downward pressure still exists on equities.

The second group retain the "we are still heading for Japan in the 1990s" line. They are basically of the opinion that nothing that the Fed can do that is not political suicide will be sufficient to stop a deflationary spiral. The money that will be dropped from helicopters will be shoved under banks' mattresses, or my mattress. The time has come to repay the debts built up in the past 15 or so years. The result will not be pretty and could even include a large dose of political instability. This is the "prepare for worse than the 1930s, this is not even part of the macro-cycle, let alonge some piddling micro-cycle".

If the second group (the significant minority to which I refer above) is right then gold will be a blinding investment (rather than just a good investment along with equities). US treasuries will be a good investment in preference to Inflation-linked bonds or equities, and, to be frank, you might as well be stocking up the larder and your nuclear defence shelter with cans of pulses, because the entire economy might break down.

Of these three groups, the Birks camp of "it will be inflation, and it will be sooner rather than later" seems to be getting the upper hand -- equities are proving surprisingly resilient at a bottom which many observers (including me) thought that they would have seen breached by now. I still see mid-to-late April as the worst of the matter when it comes to company reporting. But if the psychology of the market has shifted to "this will mean even more money being pumped into the economy by governments" then the concomitant collapse in equity prices that one would expect from huge cuts in dividends, will not be forthcoming.

In the past week (in my field), the only large company that has maintained its dividend is Munich Re, and that's with a dividend cover of significantly less than two (the proportion of your earnings that you pay out to shareholders). Swiss Re slashed its dividend to a nominal amount and announced that it would still have to raise about 5bn Swiss Francs. Other insurers announced steep cuts -- and this is an industry that is performing well in the crisis!

My hunch is still on a final tanking of shares in the first half of the year -- another 15% to 20%. So I'm maintaining a short position, but I'm not betting the house on it (although betting the house would be a significantly smaller bet now than it would have been this time last year....)


And with the UK actually going to be hit by a Winter Storm tomorrow night .... well, that might be fun. Not. That's definitely one import from France and Germany that we don't need.

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