Networking still sucks

The other night, I was doing some mild mucking about in my PC case.  Somehow, even though it wasn't involved in the mucking, my network card decided to start acting strange.  I can sort of connect to our network, but the connection would be beat in a race by an anemic 56k connection.

Of course, this isn't so bad.  It's not like I use the internet for anything on my...oh fuck, I use the internet for everything!

Needless to say, there has been a great gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, and rubbing of dirt into my hair.  Of course, troubleshooting network problems is only slightly easier than diagnosing chronic stomach pain in an angry horse.  There are no pleasant experiences when trying to figure out why something isn't working.

I have some help from the internet people, and some things I'm going to try when I get home.  If that doesn't work, I've got a 30' network cable coming tomorrow, and I'm just going to say screw it to these invisible magic waves that bring the interweb to my computer box, and go with the reliable old cable that just works, and can also be used to hang myself with when I'm unsuccessful at troubleshooting other network problems.