All Your Base Are Belong To Us — The Kip Lange Homepage

Okay, I spent EIGHT hours last night wrestling with this problem and I believe I have a solution.

Please allow me to note that, first, up until a few days ago, I was able to hot-swap network connections with my PS2 — now the PS2 also has trouble connecting. I suspect a firmware upgrade from Comcast may have caused this.

Now, if you were like me, you were banging your head against the wall trying everything — manual, auto, etc. — to get your PS3 to connect online. And it probably didn’t work.

If you call Sony or Comcast, they will tell you to “power cycle” your modem. Which is a fancy way of saying, pull the power plug on the thing, let it sit for thirty seconds, and plug it back in.

NOW: Please note, everything I’m about to tell you — I take no responsibility if you screw up your cable modem or your phone service or whatever by you following my advice.

Here’s the problem with the newer Comcast modems which also allow VoIP phone service (voice over IP, they wire your phone into your modem, a la Vonage). The battery.

Now, remember, I don’t use a router. I just swap what’s plugged into the modem.

And here’s the rub, again, with the new Comcast modems, the VoIP ones — they have a battery backup inside the modem which makes it impossible to fully power cycle the modem. Without, of course, taking the battery out. They do this so that if your power fails, you will still be able to use the phone (for a while).

Taking that battery out is exactly what you have to do. Here goes. Unplug your PC from the cable modem. Pull the power plug from the back of the modem. Turn the modem upside down, and on the bottom, you should see a little plastic piece clipped in where the battery is (it’s pretty obvious). Take it off, and inside is the battery. Looks like a biggish lithium-type battery, matte black, usually with a strap to help you get it out. Make sure you keep that strap in position for now and when you put the battery back in, or you’re going to have problems getting it back out again.

Now, as soon as you take that battery out, your phones are going to go dead. So try not to do this while somebody is on the phone or if you’re expecting an important phone call in the next five minutes.

Remove the battery. Now, give it about thirty seconds (they say ten minutes to power cycle the modem properly, but that’s bullshit, I think even ten seconds is okay). Next step is up to you. You can put the battery back in, or you can keep it out if you just want to save yourself trouble the next time you do this. If you do take it out and keep it out, though, remember that you will have no battery backup for your phones, and if that cable modem loses power, you lose phone service.

Or you can put the battery back in. Your choice. Either way, next, make sure your Playstation 3 (although this works for PS2s as well, by the way) is plugged into the modem via an ethernet cable. Now, put that power cord back into the plug. You should see the lights on the modem flash briefly, then you should see a couple on top light up, and then you will see the other ones further down light up bit by bit (takes maybe a minute) as the modem comes back online and resets itself. Again, during this period, your phones are NOT working.

Now, wait until it seems like the modem has stabilized and almost all of the lights are on. If you want, check your phone. If your phone is working, the modem is almost certainly cycled back on.

And now you can fire up the Playstation 3 (or 2, as I said). After this — it should work. I hope. I had to go through, on the Playstation 3 side, a number of configurations, enter the DNS servers manually, give it the DHCP name (which you can find by going to the start menu on your PC, hitting “Run”, typing “cmd” to bring up a command window, and then typing “ipconfig /all”, which will show you all relevant data on your IP address — the DHCP server will be numerical and you will have to “tracert” that number to get the name resolved). I may have been able to just have done an auto-configure had I figured out the problem with the modem earlier, but I don’t know. So if you’re still having problems, tweak the network connection settings on the PS3.

This really should resolve a lot of these problems floating around out there, especially people with Comcast who can’t get their PS3s to connect and get the dreaded “Error 80710102”.

Now, please note that if you have a regular cable modem, NOT one that the phone is plugged into, you don’t have to worry about the battery or the phones and you can just unplug it and power cycle it normally. There’s no battery in those.

I really hope this helps. It took me eight hours of messing around to get this done, but you really need that PS3 to be online, or you’ll miss important things like getting the latest firmware update (which is 1.3, by the way).

Good luck. I hope this helps some people.

You know what I have?

A 60 gig Playstation 3, that’s what I have.

The thing is sleek. The thing is beautiful. The thing is amazing. The thing baffled me for eight hours as to how to hook it up online (but oh, I got the bitch online).

You think your Wii is dope? Hah. I laugh at your Wii. I raise my eyebrows in scorn at your Wii. Your Wii will last a year, maybe two, before you get tired of the gimmicks.

The PS3 is boss. You gotta see this thing in action on a hi-def plasma set. I had to wipe up after myself.

Only have three games so far, but they’re a good choice. NBA 2k7 (awesome), Call of Duty 3 (awesome), and Fight Night 3 (also awesome). Yes, these are all available on the XBox 360, but man…the PS3 could crunch the 360 in about two seconds.

I held off on the big launch title, “Resistance: Fall of Man”, because I’m not the world’s biggest fan of first-person shooters. But I will be getting one more game. It’s between that and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

And I’m not bothering to get the jazzed-up Madden ’07. My PS2 Madden will work just fine, and I’m actually more comfortable with it.

On the brightest side, people can start giving me videogames as presents again when holidays and birthdays roll around — the last two PS2 holdovers I’m playing are Madden and Final Fantasy XII (I shudder to think what Square will unleash on the PS3 with FF XIII next year).

Yes, yes, yes, all in all, today was a good day.

Well, I haven’t posted a hell of a lot lately, I mean, there’s certainly stuff to post, but I just haven’t had the time or the inclination. I have a large amount of crap swirling around in a tornado-like fashion in my life right now, crap you don’t need to know about and mosty likely wouldn’t care about and which I’m not going to tell you about anyway.

But it’s getting resolved. 🙂

I have fixed — hell, I didn’t know it was broken — the All Your Base Are Belong To Us page.

You have no chance to survive make your time.

Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas.

That’s all.

Ah yes, here I go, I’m like the last man standing around here without a wife, children, a serious girlfriend, a semi-serious girlfriend, or, say, even a really high-priced hooker.

However, there is good news, from the Old Friend front. L.S. has had a baby, the baby pictures are available over here. My best to her and the happy father, Vincent.

It actually scares me because this is the first time I’ve seen a child who looks like the mother at birth.

Now, in other Old Friends news, I am glad to report that Mr. K-Rhyme is alive and kicking, I just had lunch with him yesterday, he still looks like he styles his hair in a laundry machine, and he’s definitely still silly, despite his professorial aspirations at USC and his decision that all Westerns (except every one I mention to him) are “homo-social”.

Shane is not homo-social. That’s one of the ones I mentioned. Just for the record.

That’s all for now…

When I graduated from high school, one of the most significant and important gifts I received was a tiny little book, published in 1954, called How to Lie with Statistics.

The book was simply indispensable in college, and is engrained in my mind. I don’t know where my copy currently is — I’m betting it’s in one of the stacks of books I have stored carefully in bins — but I’ve virtually memorized the thing.

How to Lie with Statistics should be required reading for any college-bound student. Today’s universities and colleges do nothing but bombard a student with frankly, blatantly false statistics that the students eat right up because they have no idea how easy it is to screw with statistics and make them do exactly what you want them to do.

But everyone should have a copy of it. Like I said, How to Lie with Statistics (the link goes straight to Amazon.com — I want you buying this thing if you don’t have it) is a slim little red book that will quickly and efficiently teach you how little faith you should place in a given statistic tossed out by anyone.

And, just for a dose of evil — it teaches you how to bend and warp statistics towards your own ends.

In today’s warped reality, this book is like a survival kit for the mind. Buy it. Buy it now.

Yep, it’s true. I finally got around to seeing Borat, and I have to admit, it just wasn’t as funny as I was hoping it would be.

I mean, it’s damn funny, there are certainly a few laugh-out-loud scenes and a good deal of chuckling, but it lacks…something.

After watching so much of Borat on Da Ali G Show, I guess I was hoping for a little more from the movie. It loses something in the translation from the small screen to the big. Borat is still a lovable, scruffy character, but the situations he puts himself into feel a little contrived, a little too over the top. The beauty of Borat — believe it or not — is that his was a sort of understated comedy (yep, I said it, understated). Some of that is lost in the scramble to make a cohesive movie out of Cohen’s skits.

All that being said, though, Borat is the funniest movie I’ve seen in a long while. It’s certainly refreshing to watch after having so many lame-ass people tell me that Wedding Crashers is “the best comedy ever” (my opinion? it sucks hairy ass, and not in the good way Borat does).

It’s just…I left wanting more of the “old” Borat. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t seen the plethora of bits Cohen’s alter ego did on Da Ali G Show. But it’s true.

Yet more tips on plasma HDTVs.

Most plasma sets have a very thin anti-glare coating on top of their protective glass. You don’t want to scratch this coating or dissolve it. So, right off the bat — Windex and paper towels are RIGHT OUT.

The proper way to clean a plasma set is to get yourself an ultra-soft cloth, as soft as possible. Now wet the cloth, then wring it out until it’s just damp. Use this to very carefully clean the TV screen.

If you have a very dirty screen, then find the MILDEST detergent around. Me, I use antibacterial hand-soap from the bathroom. Repeat the soaking and wringing steps with the cloth, but this time add a very small amount of detergent when you first wet the cloth.

This may be overkill — I know plenty of people with plasmas who do, in fact, use Windex and paper towels. I’m just givng you the most paranoid, safest method of cleaning that screen. The result from, say, a year or so using Windex and paper towels might be a slight cloudiness on the screen. You don’t want that on a set you dropped $2k or more on.

Bottom line: if you want the TV to last as long as possible, use the methods I described. Better yet, if you can get away with just dusting the TV with a dry (and still extremely soft) cloth, do that.

I’m paranoid enough to have ordered some optical-quality cleaning cloths from a camera shop (thy’re made spcifically for optical devices, for cleaning camera lenses and other such delicate tasks).

Best of luck!

I’m here to quickly dispel a myth — that you have to use a digital cable of some sort to hook up HDTV. It’s complete and utter crap. If you have a good component cable (you’ll need three video jacks, the inputs/outputs are usually colored green, blue, and red, and their names are…oh lord, I forget, one is “Pbr+” and so on…and I believe you need two audio jacks, so a grand total of five jacks, I think, so five cables…each video cable sends a different number of primary colors to the screen, three combined give you a perfect picture).

In fact, many people claim that using component cables to hook up their HDTVs not only gives them a great HD picture (it does, I tried it with mine, and stuck with the digital cable for simplicity’s sake), but it also displays regular TV channels more crisply (I cannot verify this statement; both seemed to deliver relatively the same quality of SDTV — Standard Definition TV).

Comcast actually uses component cables when they come to hook up an HD box to an HDTV. At least, they’ve done it to another TV here, and three others in the same vicinity I know about. So if you’d rather stick to component cables, don’t be afraid to do so, the HD picture is, honestly, as perfectly sharp and clear as with a digital cable, and, as I said, some people maintain that rigging your set this way gives you better standard TV channels.