So for several months now my Wii has been unable to connect to the Internet. It could get updates, use the news channel and forecast channel, but could not use the browser or shop channel. The stranger thing is that my roommate is connecting to the same router with the same settings and his Wii works fine.

I decided I should fix it, envisioning a long call to tech support and if I was lucky I would be able to ship it off for some indeterminate amount of time and eventually receive my (a) Wii back. While I dreaded this I have heard that Nintendo’s technical support is quite good. Luckily I didn’t have to experience it.

If I was going to go through the trouble of calling a technical support agent I wanted to at least know why it wasn’t working and while that would be unlikely to speed up the call I would know when I could lie and say, “ok tried that and it didn’t work” versus actually trying it out.

I have always been interested in packet sniffing but have never really had time to get into it, but at some point in the recent past I installed Wireshark and played with it. I sat there watching my laptop talk to my desktop about the printer. I felt bad that they were talking about my printer behind its back, but didn’t have the heart to let him know. Last weekend I started up Wireshark again and started sniffing my Wii traffic (by the way it smelled bad). The Wii sat there querying my primary DNS server, but never received a response from it, it also never bothered to try the secondary DNS server. So I removed primary DNS and setup the configuration so its only DNS option was the secondary one and like magic everything worked. While I am still not sure why my primary DNS server didn’t respond or why my Wii didn’t try the secondary it at least works. Its a great feeling when one of your random curiosities actually ends up having a practical use. Not to mention it probably saved me an extremely long tech call that would of had a good chance of not fixing anything.

The best thing about this is I finally got to see how my site works on the Wii with The Ultimate Gamer Pack Theme and wow it looks great. I thought the theme would just be a basic plain white theme that increases the text size or something to make it more readable on a TV. Instead, the Wii theme really makes it look like a page designed for the Wii with a similar button and content layout and easy navigation.

Since I am speaking of Wordpress themes, be sure to check out the most impressive wordpress theme I have seen, the Commodore 64 Command line theme.

…when attempting to censor information results in that information exponentially propagating to a point it would never or could never have reached had there been no attempt to censor it.

Heck every article on Slashdot Tuesday must have had the HD-DVD decoder hex key in the comments section a couple hundred time.

There is a new website up dedicated to saving Internet radio, check it out (Save Net Radio). I wrote some letters to all my congress peoples the other day and mailed them off. It looks like efforts have had some effect since The Internet Radio Equality Act is being introduced into congress to even out the rates. Luckily the looming date of May 15th has been pushed back to July 15th so the legislation might have a chance to get through.

I have tons of posts about half done, but have been to lazy to finish them up. Now Pokemon is out so I am spending a considerable amount of time on that, then I get to run off to Washington DC for a week (I wonder if I can yap at some congress people and tell them to support this bill, I don’t know how that works). I’m going to try and pump out those other posts though, we will see if I get the motivation.