Category: *heh*

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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?

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Yeh, I’m still waffling. . .

. . .between shaking my head in amazement and laughing hilariously.

From a Farcebook thread:

“War is not a product of ideology, it is a product of primitive reasoning.”

Hilarious! Oh, I’d agree to the extent that “primitive reasoning”=”basic human nature.” Otherwise, really hilarious, the very model of “primitive reasoning.”

Posted on

Let’s Improve Society, eh?

An acquaintance’s child noted recently that saving people from the obvious, easily-foreseen results their stupidity just results in more of the same. Yeh, I paraphrased, but it’s true.

I propose that new triage rules be instituted in emergency rooms along these lines.

“How did that happen? Really? That was stupid of you. Go bleed out over there.”

Maybe it should be carried out by EMTs at the scene, if they were summoned.

Evolution in action or just letting the gene pool naturally clean itself?

Posted on

Perspiring Minds. . .

. . .don’t really GARA, but I sometimes wonder, WTF are people who mispronounce “jewelry” as “jewlery” thinking?

Oh, right. They’re not.

What really chaps my gizzard, though, are Mass MEdia Podpeople and commercial “actors” who say “jewlery.” What are they taking money under false pretenses for?

Posted on

The Natives Are Restless. . .

While the savages in Ferguson and elsewhere demonstrate why ordinary folks hold them in contempt, I’m once again glad I live in America’s Third World County™, where there may be violence from time to time, but usually limited to one-on-one (and at least one of the participants was askin’ for it). There’s quite a bit of gunfire, but it’s usually limited to the range, the deer (or other game) woods, and occasionally shots fired at someone who’s askin’ for it (trespassing, attempted burglary/robbery–usually out in the country where it’s REALLY stupid to try, cos if the 00 shot doesn’t get you, the landowner’s dogs will).

It’s nice to live somewhere with the virtues of civilization and few(er) of its vices.

Keep it in the X-ring, folks!