m06orama – nerdly musings from Winnipeg (Wordpress)

I am from East Scottish coal mining stock and my family background is Presbyterian, but it did not include much in the way of traditional religious observance. Most of my uncles were card-carrying Communists, strictly about christenings, weddings, and funerals. The word “God” was mentioned quite a lot, but rarely in a prayerful context. Our family bible was most often used as a missile. Alas!

So this lady calls me up at work. She spoke to FOUR previous agents. We soon figured out that her computer wasn’t plugged in to her modem. We plugged it in, I reset the modem, and she rebooted her PC. Then she was back online.

It was late October, 2004. The phone rang about 15:00. I had the day off from my call center job. I was sitting in my skivvies at my computer, drinking beer and reading the news.

Bob Collens (Robert John Collens, 12/31/1947-5/24/2009) was a man I got to know and spend some time with in 2007. He introduced himself to me one day and before long we were talking about common interests and experiences we had. Bob only had partial use of a car at the time and used to spend a lot of time alone. We used to go out driving to various parks in the Winnipeg area, eat out, and go to movies and stuff. Along the way, we shared each other’s life stories, quite a few laughs, and we talked about an astonishingly wide range of subjects including: cars, computers, fear, our families, hydrogen cars, politics, recovery, religion, terror, therapy, the women in our lives, and much else. Bob was a gentle friend and support.

After a while all friendships change and I didn’t see Bob at all in the last year or so. It was with much sadness I heard he had passed away after a short illness. Due to my own failure to keep in touch, I never got to say goodbye.

My best memories of Bob are:

Rest in peace, Bob.

You can see some pictures of Bob on this slideshow.

Re. This article in the NY Times

‘For example, the sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed.’

Are you freakin’ kiddin’ me?

You are in the call center. You are on your own. Just you, a headset, a phone, a computer, and the clock.

The phone rings.

“Thuh Inner-nayt is de-uh-own”

“No it isn’t. Just restart your modem and your router. See?”

The phone rings again.

“I forgot my WEB KEY”.

“Let me show you how to sign into your router to get your key.”

“Why do we have to go through all this? Why can’t you just tell me my WEB KEY”

“Because it’s only stored on your router”.

“What’s a router?”

Education starts with knowing that you don’t know the answer to something, then asking a question, then listening to what you get back, and so on.

It helps if you have attention span and you can read and are able to follow up on the answers that you receive.

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

1) Most retail or ISP “home networking” routers are built to a low, low price, and you only get what you pay for.

1) Most retail or ISP “home networking” routers are built to a low, low price, and you only get what you pay for.
2) The router OS usually does not include (e.g.) a cron job to reboot regularly to force automatic cleanup of queues, etc. Some customers would like this, but it might be considered disruptive, so it’s avoided.
3) Even if the manufacturer’s power supply is robust, they are often mismatched, whether by ISP techs or home owners, and this causes all sorts of problems including overheating and frequent router resets.
4) [Name of ISP withheld] guidance is NOT to plug an integral modem/router into a power bar or surge protector if possible, since this is supposed to help avoid the problem of the router resetting itself to factory defaults due to a “power surge” (supposedly caused by: lightning, “storm surge”, brown-out, or power cut). This mainly affects wireless clients, since customization (SSID, WEP or WPA) gets lost, and you end up with a house full of “wireless orphans”.
5) Rightly or wrongly, many High Speed Internet customers seem to be under the impression that their service is supposed to be up and available ALL the time. Looking at their monthly tariffs (often $50 per month or higher) this is not unreasonable, whereas – in practice – most residential Internet equipment (modems and routers) is subject to various additional upstream issues including line breaks, cable head end restarts, upstream router restarts, name server switching (?), and all sorts of other issues I don’t even know about. In this environment, having to restart FIRST the modem, and THEN the router cleans up more than 50% of all “can’t connect” scenarios, and – these days – you often do NOT have to restart the computers as well. This simple information is not known by the majority of consumers, especially those whose own sense of “entitlement” gives them the mindset to get on the phone and be sarcastic (or worse) at the first sign of any disruption to their (residential service), “because I work from home”, etc. Arguably, MOST router restarts are requested by ISP tech support folks while trying to do basic cleanup as a prelude to other troubleshooting.
6) I have some sympathy for folks who happen to live “in a bad spot” in terms of their chosen Internet provider’s infrastructure. They just seem to go apoplectic after a while if problems continue.

In conclusion, consumers deserve better, and the industry (both ISPs and router manufacturers) should be providing it.

See http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=612415&cid=24170151
Why do we have to restart routers?
by cooker47 (1096599) on Sunday July 13, @02:00AM (#24170151)

Ya, so I got ten days of vacazione from “mah cawull senner jeyohb”. I went on a 3-day spree, and then realized that altho’ the economy is not my fault, my own personal economy is down to me. Uh-oh! I hate having to be responsible.

On my late 2005 Mac Mini G4 1.5Ghz I just replaced my original 80GB Seagate drive after Disk Utility failed multiple times to repair “Invalid node structure”.

After installing a new 160 GB Seagate ST9160281A (5 years warranty, $112 Canadian), and booting from my Tiger Install disk, I found that Disk Utility would also not see the new drive. I took everything apart again (I love that cracking sound when you open the case) and found that the corner of one of those pieces of yellow tape had fallen off the Airport cable and a corner of it was caught in the ATA slot on the motherboard where the riser fits.

So, I carefully removed the tape and swabbed the riser contacts with a Q-Tip moistened in alcohol mouthwash. After drying, I put it all back together again and this time it worked.

In reassembly, I also noticed that there was still a bit of wiggle room, a little gap where the drive connector plugs into the riser, so I applied a judicious bit of extra finger pressure to the back of the riser in order to make sure it was seated properly and the gap minimized.

Also about reassembly, after reinstalling the Mac Mini’s case, DVDs would not eject. The reason for this was that I had an alignment problem after incorrectly mounting the Airport device on the front right hand corner of the DVD drive.

I referred to http://www.smashsworld.com/2005/01/mac-mini-complete-technical.php and the excellent document http://str.smashsworld.com/?mac_mini.pdf. This clearly showed me that the Airport card is supposed to be mounted on the notched plastic clip at the BACK right-hand corner of the case.

I had not been able to mount DVDs at all before starting the work, so to start with I could not even boot up the install disk to run Disk Utility, but that was resolved easily enough after removing the case. After cleaning the Mac Mini inside with lots of canned air and then vacuuming, I carefully squirted a few extra shots of canned air through the mouth of the DVD drive, and then it was working again.