Archives, eh
-
# Links for 2008-07-11
iFixit disassembles an iPhone 3G
If I had been in NZ and I had seen those guys, I would have shot them: “Your honour…they were going to disassemble an iPhone.”...”Good god! Case dismissed, get this man a Victoria’s Cross and a beer” ✴ -
# It is an exact quote
What a night.
Well, actually; what a previous twenty-four hours. Except that doesn’t roll off the large bundle of skeletal muscles on the floor of the mouth.
My net connection has been dodgy for the last ten or eleven days; basically it would drop at irregular intervals and then take a minute or so to come back. It could have been so many things; modem, router, phone line, filter, some unfriendly device vomiting radio signal all over the shop. Being a cheap bastard – almost as much as a scotsman! – I decided to believe it was Optus and it would go away. That way it wouldn’t cost me any money to replace anything. Cunning like a fox!
Forward ten days and I finally break down and start testing devices. Impossible to test unless someone is actually using the net, so I pull out the router and plug D directly into the modem and go to work. I’m thinking, if the router is the problem, this’ll fix everything except for the fact that everyone will be rooted to the modem by blue cables again. I couldn’t quite figure out which way the Universe would come down on this one. On the one hand, minor inconvenience until I spend money; on the other, the problem wouldn’t be solved.
I hadn’t factored in one minor aspect. That it would be the modem, that this – you would think – minor change in circumstances would make the modem worse, that the dropouts would come faster and faster; and D. I should have realised if this should happen that it would greatly inconvenience D, who would need to tell me about it. A lot. That this would make trying to work…challenging. I should have realised that this could happen, because if it could happen the Universe would make it happen.
Needless to say, after D made her displeasure known I sat down in front of that thing as soon as I got home and started troubleshooting like my life depended on it. Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to have made a typo in that last sentence. Somehow my fingers typed ‘like’ when of course they meant ‘because’. And there should have been an ‘absolutely’ in there as well. Possibly even a ‘fucking’.
Ended up calling tech support for the ISP, just before the Simpsons started. About ten minutes into the second episode, Bangalore picked up. Went through the usual shit like “What lights are on” and a power down of the modem. We then spent the next 75 minutes – oh, I’m not even kidding a little bit – entering my username and password into the modem and rebooting. No, nothing else. Just that. Oh no, I tell a lie, at one stage the modem absolutely shat itself and all the lights were blinking malevolently in unison. She wanted me to do a factory reset which didn’t work and then had me power down the modem. I spent the last twenty minutes in anticipation, wondering when she’d call it, if this was the moment she’d admit the modem was rooted. She didn’t; didn’t want to admit it in case I took it the wrong way and accused her of breaking it. In a way she did, but only because it was clearly on the way out and all that happened is together we pushed it over the edge.
She told me she would have to pass it on to level 2 tech support. That they would call back in four hours. I suggested that since four hours was going to be 1 in the morning that calling back in four hours would be an ill-advised venture. Privately I was already planning to take the modem out back behind the shed and sending it to modem heaven.
Cue tonight. Had D buy a new modem during the day, came home and started setting it up. One day I am going to buy a video camera and film myself trying to do anything hardwarey. It must be fucking high-fucking-larious, watching my eyes bulge, my fists shake, listening to me whimper, scream and swear at the computer, the cables, the things that are in my way, my shoes, everything. It must be! The Universe keeps fucking arranging it, putting a series of teeny tiny annoyances in my way, things that no reasonable person could get frustrated with until you get to about the tenth one at which point homicide is a distinct option.
I thought I had reached the culmination. I really did. I actually sat down on the couch and said out loud, “This is it. Nothing else can possibly go wrong, there is no conceivable option left to that bastard Universe. End of the road. I don’t know what my password was left at after the million attempts to change it, but all I have to do is call tech support again and I can get it reset.”
Oh. You would think after a life of this shit that I would have come to hold a greater respect for the ability of the Universe to fuck me around like a little bitch. And lo! here it comes a-gallop on some great black steed to knock me down and bust my fucking balls.
All I have to do is call tech support. “What’s the number? I dunno, I’ll just look it up at www.whitepages.com….oh, for fucks sake.” We don’t keep phone books. Why would we? We have the internet, we can just look it up. What’s the number for directory service? Fuck knows, I have the internet for that shit! I actually spent five minutes rocking on the floor before I remembered. Phone books! On the stoop!
Great, I have the number for tech support. Ring ring. Get through the absurd voice activated IVR. On hold. The Simpsons has just started.
Ten minutes after Futurama started, Bangalore picks up.
gilmae: “aloha, I just got a new modem and I need to get my password reste because I forget what it is.”
Phone Monkey: “Ok, first can you tell me what lights are on on your modem”
g: ”∗sigh∗ fine…”
<fifteen minutes later>
PM: “OK, now enter your username and password”
<several moments pass. FX: shattering sound, as if a fragile grip on reality and civility has just fallen to the ground and exploded into a million tiny, sharp fragments>
g: “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me!!!”
-
# The Triumph of Laziness over Adversity
In late February my desktop computer started failing – to be precise it started rebooting spontaneously. I am pretty sure it started while I was out of town for a couple of days; I remember getting home, turning on the monitor and thinking “I didn’t log out, did I?”.
The desktop has since become unusable which I believe I have mentioned before. Allow me to then catalog the tasks that result directly from this that I am just too lazy to do.
- Memtest the ram chips. As a friend has already told me, if I can’t even motivate to do this simple task, there is no hope for me at all.
- Install win 2k on a spare box I have (Pentium 333 I think) and use it as a print server. It should be noted that this is already a lazier solution than my original plan to work out how to run the printer in linux.
- Even lazier, move the printer from my computer to Ds
- Extract my mail archives from the old hard drive and copy them to my notebook, so that I can access a variety of important emails.
To date, every time I think of doing one of these things, somehow my brain takes over and starts up World of Warcraft.
I…I am going to have a problem with the second step; don’t even get me started on the ludicrousness of steps 3, 5-7, and 11.
-
# *cough* urrghhhh, sinuses hurt
Sick as a dog right now with a cold. In November. I thought I I was home free, made it through the whole year without a cold and then just as we roll into spring and I let my guard down tWM tracks on into the house. Bah!
D bought me a video card and a new game on Wednesday. She had seen me checking out “CivCity: Rome” a few times but when it came to actually buying the game, she couldn’t remember much except that it involved Rome. Yeah.
On the other hand, by all reports Caesar IV is a better game anyway and I got some bonus material with the game for pre-ordering it – it should be noted that I am pretty sure it was the online retailer that pre-ordered it, not D – so all is well.
Except. Except that when D went to get the card I had done some research and told her a specific model to buy. The store was out of stock but sold her a different one with assurances that it was the same except better! The same except PCI Express instead of AGP. The same except unusable in my computer which still uses steam instead of plugging into the wall. Ah well, we’ll fix that on the weekend.
Meanwhile, in an MSM conversation with the guy who left Giga – the job I just left – a week and a half after I started (Andrew is The Boy whom I despised):
-- asahi -- dan: lol the support girls msn’d me this morning saying they dont know if andrew knows what hes doing. I reassured them that he certainly doesnt :)
Oh dear, months from now I will still be laughing at that one.
-
# Work, Relatives and Wi-Fi
On Tuesday I was feeling lost. On Wednesday I was thinking I had made a mistake. On Thursday I knew I had made a mistake. On Friday I was feeling better and had decided to just roll with it.
The real problem is that I no longer have control. At the last place I had complete autonomy over everything to do with my projects. I was a team of one and accountable only to the client.
Here I have no client. At this point I don’t really even have customers. The sitch, Kim, is that there are a half dozen sites running various vintages of the version 3 codebase. There is then the version 4 codebase which has been in development for something along the lines of a year – maybe eighteen months – but is being kind of forced upon the company by their sole developer. Owner of the company doesn’t see the need for it. I can credibly argue the point from both directions.
To mitigate the coffee situation, I may have Counterstrike installed, but it crashes my system after five minutes. I may have water views and all that, but Darling Harbour is essentially one huge multi-acre rippling mirror reflecting and focusing the light of the afternoon sun straight into my optical nerve. I may have administrator rights on this website but it is a triple-edged sword. Sure, if I like I can browse through people’s private galleries. However people whose private galleries you might want to browse through have no need for a site like adultmatchmaker.com.au. The googles, they do nothing!
My sister made it to the UK fine. She has had trouble settling down as well – she has better reason though, being thousands of kilometres away in the
armpit of the universeMother Country where she knows no-one. Global Roaming didn’t work as expected for her, so she was making stressed out reverse charge calls to Dad. Those crazy poms thought she was South African, although I suppose we can blame Hollywood for that since American actors can only do one accent, Incompetely Trained American Actor, and “Australians” always sound South African or Kiwi.On the other hand, I called her last night. My heart sank when I heard her voice turn all Essex-ey on a couple of words. She’s already turned to the Bland Side.
Meanwhile, the wireless network is networking. The two desktops connect fine, the internet connection is fine, bittorrent torrents, World of Warcraft connects – even if I am planning to close my account in the next couple of days – and so on and so forth. All is wirelessly good. Except for one small thing. The whole fucking point of getting the network was so I could connect to the network on my notebook without having to have cat 5 running across the room. The notebook – or rather Ubuntu – is not playing nice with the PCMCIA card, a D-Link DWL-G630. The windows drivers are installed using ndiswrapper and the ndiswrapper admin tool claims that the correct device for that driver is present. The only problem is that the system hangs up immediately after the login screen. It’s like it is 1998 again and linux’s relationship with hardware is shitting me to tears. Or perhaps it is just my relationship with hardware.
-
# Now I can't connect from anywhere
So, that part of my life is done. Apart from consultancy work for perhaps a couple of hours a week for the next month or so, my employment at $company is now over.
Oh yeah…
$company.dispose(); $company = new Company();Friday was a good day, or at least it was for me. I’m sure not so much for everyone staying behind. Everyone went out for lunch, at which it was revealed to me that I eat too much barramundi – I ordered it at lunch and when it arrived I saw money changing hands between two ex-coworkers. They had made a bet I would order it.
The $clients sent me a gift package. When it first arrived I looked at it thinking “Why would they be sending me more work now when I’m fucking leaving?!?”. It was a bottle of wine though and numerous gift-type foodstuffs – biscotti, truffles (the chocolate not the fungus), chilli, conserves and the like. Well, at least I made a favourable impression on them.
D convinced me that I needed to buy myself a “new job present”. I had almost six weeks of annual leave built up when I left which made for a very tidy payout, thank-you-very-much, so I figured I might as well buy something. I bought a wireless router and two wifi cards for the desktop computers and one for the notebook.
sigh What is it about me and hardware. Or configuation? Infrastructure in general. I must emit some field that causes the simplest of things to become infitely and painfully complex. From what I can tell, I have – or rather had – a working wi-fi network but the router and the modem were not talking to each other. They are both D-Link devices, so perhaps there is some family melodrama that I was unaware of going on here, some fussin’ and feudin’ between the router and the ADSL modem branches.
I say “had” because Pre offered advise which I tried to follow but with my usual lack of ability. He told me to turn off DHCP on the modem and to make it an access point. So I turned off DHCP and sorta went “Huh?” at the other. Suddenly, I couldn’t even connect to the network, which is no fucking surprise, I suppose, since the computer was now unconnected to any device handing out IP addresses, so it default to whatever it is windows defaults to…169.192.*?
I hate hardware.
