My broadband connection just came back

It was Thursday last week, I powered up my trusty desktop, and oops, no internet. So I did the usual thing, pull the plug to the cable modem and the Netgear router, and then plug 'em in again. No dice. Hmm, maybe the network is down? Sometime after lunch I decide to wade thru the voice mail hell that is calling for technical assistance. My first calls get to pleasant sounding but clueless young ladies at an overseas call center. Some persistence gets me through to the service center in Maine. The lady at the service center says the network is OK, and then she interrogates my modem remotely and it says it's OK, but "the receive signal is a little weak". We schedule a service call for Monday.
I decide to keep blogging on Word. Bloggable ideas are getting scarce, and if I don't write 'em down when they occur to me, I forget them.
Monday morning arrives. I decide to double check. I pull my daughter's discarded laptop out from under the bed and plug it directly into the router. Bingo, beatup laptop logs on immediately and I can catch up on Instapundit. Wow. maybe it isn't the cable modem stuff.
Trusty Desktop is connected via a wireless card. I had a cable built into the house, but I never used it, 'cause the electrician didn't crimp a connector on the end and I found I could buy the wireless card for less than the proper crimping tool for the RJ-45 connector used on LAN cables. I snip the connector off a spare LAN cable and splice it onto the cable to the desktop. Strip, twist together, solder, and insulate with heatshrink tubing. There is an industry standard for the color codes of the 8 wires inside LAN cables, you just have to match up the colors.
Plug the newly spliced cable in, go upstairs, and try the desktop again. The task bar icon shows "connected" on the wired LAN, and I can ping the router box. But, still can't get on the net. So I have one computer that gets on the net and a second one that won't. Arrgh.
About this time the Time Warner service guy pulls up in a van. He pulls a brand new cable modem out of his truck and installs it. The new modem is about half the size of the old one, and presumably has spiffier semiconductors inside it. It powers up and bingo, BOTH computers now can get on the net. Dunno how that happened, but it did.
Logic says that if one computer can get on the net, the cable modem is OK. So, either that ain't so, or the desktop just decided to stop being cranky, or something. Let's see how long things last.
So I posted the last few days of blog ideas a few minutes ago, and how it's time to catch up on the email.

Political talk that ain’t worth your time.

I watched a long TV discussion between Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the house, and E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist. Dionne would review various political ideas and classify them as “liberal” or “neo conservative”. He didn’t discuss the goodness or badness of the ideas, he just attempted to label the ideas he liked “liberal” and the ideas he didn’t like as “neo-conservative”. Newt did somewhat better, he did try to bring the debate around to real things, such as the decision to disband the Iraqi army, but Dionne wasn’t having any. He didn’t want to talk about the merits of ideas; he just wanted the viewers to agree with his ideas about good and bad. In short, Dionne was not willing to reach out to voters and citizens and appeal to their heads. He appeals to their partisanship.

So do all the TV talking heads who use the phrase “flip flop”. They are not attacking the ideas on the merits; they are accusing the speaker of going back on his sworn word. So does Obama when he rails against “Bush’s third term”. If he doesn’t like ideas, why not explain why he doesn’t like them?

Words of the Weasel, Pt 8

“Passed” or “passed away”. It’s all over the tube this weekend in connection with Tony Snow. Why can’t the TV people just say “died”?

They don’t do car ads they was they used to

I’m watching a short clip on “Speed” the car lover’s cable channel. The camera pans back and forth over a Ferrari 3300. The hood is raised, we see the fine Italian power plant, the manual transmission, the suspension parts, in short the nuts and bolts of this hot car. Then we get some shots on the road. For a point of difference, this particular Ferrari is painted grey, rather than the proper red, but the nondescript color lets the good lines of the styling show to advantage. Bottom line, after watching a 5 minute TV show/infomercial I am ready to own and drive a Ferrari.

The show cuts to commercial. A camera looks down on a blue car pulled into the gas pumps. We watch the fuel hose slip out of the fill pipe and slink down to let the air out of the rear tire. “Gas pumps hate us” “Chevrolet Cobalt” and “36 MPG” float across the screen. Cute, but it doesn’t sell the car to me, not the way the Ferrari piece sold that Ferrari. The top camera angle shows little of the vehicle. I’m left wondering “is that car

Wall Streeter opines upon the sub prime mortgage disaster

Ethan Penner, “a pioneer in real estate finance” shared his thinking with us on yesterday’s Wall St Journal op-ed page. He laments the fall of “securitization” and the business model for large sections of Wall St. He feels that credit rating agencies are completely capable of assessing the worth and risk of mortgage backed securities. Right there, we can see the difference between the Wall St world and the real world. A home mortgage is a sound investment only if the borrower[s] are both willing and capable to make their payments until the either they sell and move, or they pay the mortgage off. No way can a paper pusher in an office at Moody’s Investor Services have the faintest idea about the stability of a borrower. An experienced loan officer conducting a face to face interview with the borrowers can make a pretty good call (most of the time) but without that personal contact with the borrowers, you don’t have a clue. To say nothing of inspecting the property to see if its sale value is somewhere close to the amount of the loan. If the borrowers cannot/will not make their mortgage payments, the lender is going to take a huge loss. After foreclosure, the lender has to sell the property to get any money back. If the house was salable, the owners would have sold it to pay off the mortgage. Only the unsalable properties get as far as foreclosure.

Then Mr. Penner explains the difficulties doing thirty year mortgages with depositor’s funds with can be withdrawn at will. He blames the 1980’s savings and loan (S&L) disaster on depositors withdrawing their money from the S&L’s. In actual fact, the S&L’s went broke after Congress repealed the laws that restricted S&L’s to doing home mortgages. They used this new freedom to play the stock and commodities markets. Being unsophisticated newbies, the S&L’s got taken to the cleaners by sharp/dishonest salesmen. In the real world, a bank, even a junior bank like an S&L, can increase deposits by paying depositors higher interest.

Mr. Penner’s suggests a new system where the bank keeps owner ship of the mortgage, and issues some sort of trick bond to raise cash to do more mortgages. He doesn’t understand that, with or without trickery, such a bond works just like the ordinary bonds issued by ordinary companies every day. Investors buy ordinary corporate bonds based on the reputation of the issuer and the interest rate promised. The “securitized mortgage bonds” that fueled the sub prime lending spree, and of which Mr. Penner is so fond, were “backed” by the mortgages. Starting last summer, investors learned that the “backing” was worth no more than the underlying mortgages were worth, and surprise surprise, those mortgages turned out to be worthless.

A basic fact of mortgage lending, the lender has to borrow the funds for LESS interest than that charged for the mortgage. Today my local band is offering 30 year fixed rate mortgages for 6 and a fraction %. That means no way can an investor in mortgages make more than 6 and a fraction %. Mr. Penner states that investors could earn mid to high teens and that wasn’t very appetizing. This is the sort of thing a mortgage backed security salesman might say.

One Man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter

Taxpayer funded National Public Radio (NPR) is calling the FARC “rebels” rather than terrorists. Doesn’t matter that FARC has been kidnapping for ransom, holding hostages chained to jungle trees for years, drug dealing, and murdering anyone who gets in their way. Doesn’t matter that the government of Columbia, against whom they “fighting”, is democratically elected and enjoys solid popular support. No matter, NPR likes the FARC and supports them, calling them by the romantic label “rebels” rather than calling them terrorists, which they are.

Let’s hope the Columbian armed forces are able to defeat the FARC in short order.

The Price of Gasoline is going down

Heard that on the BBC just this evening. Wonder what world they are reporting from?