Author: David

Over-educated Curmudgeon, Bit-Bucket Tuner and Budding Brewmeister.
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Fun, Fun, Fun. . .

And I don’t even have a T-Bird for “Daddy” to take away. . .

So, our Third World County™ “baling wire and chewing gum” telco has decided to enter the late 20th Century and extend fiber to the house. Sound cool? Notsomuch.

Let me ‘splain. [pause] No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Fiber to the house means no more power over telco lines (no copper to carry it), and telco line power, or a substitute, is needed for POTS.

So, substitute is. . . a required outdoor power outlet where the telco line enters.

The current location for the telco line is. . . suboptimal, for several reasons. (One reason? Since the fiber line was run in at the street, they’d have to trench around 3/4 of the house to get to the current entrance. Another? The line into the house from the original construction sucks dead bunnies through a straw and needs replacing anyway. There are others.) So, I offered ’em a place on the South wall of the garage for placement of the new box and entry to the house.

But. No interior POTS wiring there. No electrical circuit with a line to that wall.

In attic:

  • run Cat5e (since I have scads of the stuff) from Network closet to South wall of garage and effect an exit to the location for new box.
  • sever the power to the light in the garage (NOT the line to the light switch!) and install a junction box with a line paying down the South wall of the garage (encased in non-conductive protective material–reasons below)
  • install an exterior, weatherproof outlet/box.

Not such a trouble, but. . .

Yeh, it was.

The garage was originally a carport, as I understand (makes sense from the construction). South wall of garage construction:

Brick shirtwaist between three concrete columns; above that, ordinary stick wall (w/ typical drywall) that was added between the brick shirtwaist and the STEEL BEAM that ties the columns together. So. . . no drilling a hole and fishing cable/wiring through the wall, no.

Then. . . the original wood siding was covered over about 30 years ago with vinyl siding (with styrofoam insulating sheets between the vinyl and the wood siding).

Ugly (and not entirely safe) cable/wiring routing, hence need to cover. Weird layers of materials to penetrate to route wiring/cabling to exterior. Lots of exercise with a ¾” auger bit in a manual brace&bit setup. Destroying as little vinyl siding as possible (temps hovering around freezing, so the stuff’s pretty brittle), using a caulk/sealant that barely works at these temps, repairing drywall, installing a new grounding rod for the system–some semi-techie reasons why I prefer local grounding for the outlet to supplement to circuit grounding: all these and more made for fun, fun, fun.

And THAT’S the short version. *heh*

Just glad I had most of the tools and materials on hand, and wasn’t out much on what I didn’t have, because we don’t use our phone line for anything that fiber would improve (voice only) and I’m SURE the phone company, besides using MY power, now, will end up raising my rate for basic POTS service.

Oh, well. Part of the price one pays for living in an otherwise ideal Third World County™.

Oh, it’s nice to have decent POTS wiring in the house now. AND, when the guys come by to trench for the line to the house, I got ’em to commit to hauling off a bunch of yard waste–I made sure it was right in the route from the street to the new box ;-)– and put the fence back afterwards. *heh* So, at least I’ll have something for the telco’s use of my electricity.

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Interesting. . .

Support call to Mediacom. Seems that between 12-22-14 and 12-25-14 our household suddenly! used 33% of our monthly data cap (yeh, Mediacom has a data cap on cable Internet. Sucky Mediacom). 33% in less than 3 days.

Talked to one guy who said there was nothing he could do. I told him to just shut up and give me his supervisor, because I wouldn’t listen to any more BS from him. While I was on hold waiting for someone to come on and claim to be his supervisor, I changed our wireless access key (WPA-PSK2) from one 16-character uppercase/lowercase/alphanumeric/symbol nonsense password (a mix of three registration keys from commercial software I no longer use and haven’t for some time *shrugs* It’s one of many techniques for coming up with moderately secure passwords. While I was at it, I set the Win8 computers to meter their network usage. *shrugs* It’s easy to do, so why not?) to another.

Person claiming to be a supervisor came on the line. I had to expound upon the problem all over again, because the incompetent person I first talked to had not relayed ANY information. That took a while. I was asked to hold for a while. She came back on the line and told me others had reported similar issues and she would dispatch a technician to examine [whatever]. She also told me I probably ought to change my wireless access key. (Which I had done BEFORE she spoke to me.)

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. All the above–being put on hold twice, two conversational episodes with the latest helpdesk person–took about 20 minutes. In that time, AFTER I had changed the wireless access password–our Internet usage (only ONE Internet-capable computing device even on during this time) was nearly one gigabyte of data. I told the “supervisor” that, and. . . since then, nearly 24 hours by now, only another 200 megabytes of usage has been recorded.

Nearly a gig of data “consumed” in ~20 minutes AFTER having changed the password (the only remedy offered by the helpdesk “supervisor”) and only about 200MB in the, now, nearly 24 hours since, with three and sometimes four devices using the connection.

I fully expect to have some lame excuse proffered proposing that it was the password change that made the difference, but since changing the password, immediately broke the wireless connection on the computer used to do it, nearly a gig of data was supposedly downloaded through our network after that, but the data stream didn’t slow until after I informed the “supervisor” that the data stream had continued to flow at such a rate AFTER the remedy she suggested had been in effect for the past 20 minutes. Yeh, I actually got a moment of silence on that one, and. . . since then, normal data streams.

Mediacom will still try to push it off on us, but they’ll be in for a surprise. No, the scenario does not definitively say HOW the change happened–either way–but it does walk and quack suspiciously like a duck.

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One of My Favorite Things

Every now and then, someone has said to me, either humorously or not, that I’m full of shit. I always smile at the patent falsehood. I can’t be “full of shit,” because I seem to have three or four large bowel movements each day.

Each one is a moving experience.

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Staying Dry *sigh*

‘T’was the week before Xmas and all through the castle,
Not a faucet was dripping or flowing *sigh*–hassle.
“No leaks inside, let’s call the city.”
“No leaks on our side; it’s all yours, more’s the pity.”

‘T’was the week before Xmas and all through the house.
Not a creature was drinking–not even a mouse!
But oh! Is that water, stored in the pantry?
Prayers of thanks, shouts of joy are raised from the chantry. . .

I’ll just let you imagine the rest.

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Heck, yeh, I read too much. . .

I even read book blurbs for kids books (cos my Wonder Woman’s a children’s librarian), and even those are often written by extremely confused people, as witness,

“Join the adventure as Andy meets an alien, learns what they want on planet earth, and devises a bold plan to stop them.”

AN alien with multiple personalities?

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Needed: More Chlorine in the Shallow End of the Gene Pool *grumble-grumble-gripe-complain*

WILLFUL incompetence IS malicious, as is incompetence resulting from willful stupidity, a common trait in those who want to control others’ lives. (No matter how “intelligent” someone is, choosing to do stupid, harmful things just because one wants to–for whatever reason–is just plain evil.)

“Smart” people who choose to behave like morons also seem to be “the universe’s” way of saying there are holes in Darwin’s (and his worshipers’) theoretical musings. . . and the universe (via plain old cause and effect) is perfectly happy to fill those holes with self-made morons’ disasters.

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A Slightly Different Kind of Advent/Xmas Thought

This is more of a challenge to the reader, several, actually.

First challenge: relate the following to Xmas/Advent:

While I have known some atheists who score well on IQ tests, Pascal’s Wager aside, atheism is profoundly arrogant, and arrogance is always stupid. (Challenge #2: Wha!?! Discuss amongst yourselves. The voices in my head have been chewing on this one for decades.)

In a similar fashion, I have known some self-proclaimed agnostics who also score well on IQ tests, but whose mental scotoma (consisting of unconscious, unexamined preconceived biases) prevents them seeing the intellectual dishonesty, laziness, and inherent contradictions of their position. (On that last, ask an agnostic how he can know he doesn’t know if God exists. After he wanders off into the woods of epistemology, then you can start to really have fun playing with his brain. Challenge 3: Discuss amongst yourselves, etc. :-))

And yes, I still assert that this is an Advent/Xmas-related post (that’s the easiest challenge *heh*). Here’s a wee hint: every year around Advent, I start really thinking about Easter. Every year around Easter, I ponder Advent/Xmas. Why would I do that?