Just a quick administration note:

Apparently there have been various spam advertisements left as comments on this board. Guess what, people? Although this weblog is scarcely updated –it is still monitored. The spam problem has now been fixed. All comments must now be approved before they will appear.

Have a nice day!

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The Crystal Orb has now been upgraded to Wordpress 1.5. I am still tweaking the style.

Problems are expected to be minimal.

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Here is some information for those using Cox cable internet services in Las Vegas, NV as their ISP.

If your computer browser is set to use the DNS server located at 24.234.0.71 you will have a 50-70 percent chance of not reaching this domain. This is because this particular DNS server only returns the correct response for this domain (and a few others) some of the time, and randomly is unable to resolve the domain query. Cox has been informed of the problem, but after several months the situation has not changed.

A temporary solution with Internet Explorer is to hit retry after flushing your DNS cache using the “ipconfig /flushdns” command at the command prompt in Windows XP. If you are using a variant of linux and Mozilla Firefox you can just keep hitting “retry” on the browser until you connect.

Personally, I became fed up with the problem and fixed it permanently by switching my network settings to a DNS server located outside the Cox Las Vegas network. If they won’t/can’t fix the problem then I just won’t use their DNS!

In any case, these failures to connect to this domain are outside of my authority to resolve. And the problem is known.

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Welcome to The Crystal Orb. You’ll find all kinds of neat stuff in here.

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