Prayer

I'll be the first to confess that I myself find prayer to be an often hard thing to comprehend. I agree that it is a "natural thing to do," but for some reason the naturalness of it seems to get short-circuited. Our fallen nature? The wiley temptation of our adversary? I don't know.

* * *

Pope John Paul II will, I think, hold a special place in history. It was only natural that his successor would find the shoes to be large and hard to fill. I would guess that in time Pope Benedict XVI will find his niche.

* * *

My LinkSys 2.4Ghz Wireless Broadband router has suddenly decided to stop accepting the DHCP address offered by my cable modem. The cable modem seems to be offering it just fine. I know this because when I plug my PC directly into the cable modem, I instantly get an IP address. But try as I might, the wireless router just won't seem to accept it. The router acts as a DHCP server downstream, and that function seems to work okay -- my PC gets its 192-dot address lickety-split. But since the router has no upstream address to the modem ... well, things are somewhat flat.

Here's what utterly perplexes me. This worked just last night. That router has no moving parts. One would think that if a piece of solid state circuitry worked at time t, then at time t+1 it would still work. Right?

The dark and cynical side of me believes that Comcast is doing something insidious to block the functioning of my router so they can sell me their "home networking" solution. But I can't imagine they'd be able to really tell that what's downstream from their modem is a NAT device ... could they? I thought the whole purpose of a NAT device was to utterly shield the Internet from knowing that there's anything behind the NAT address at all.

But what do I know. I'm a luddite at heart.