11/15/99

First of all, my appolagies that I didn’t update sooner. Yes, I’m
home, alive etc. The final day of Edmonton was cold, grey, and
threatening to snow, pretty yucky. We didn’t go climbing, but that’s
ok, it was my holiday and if recovery meant sleeping in longer and
doing less, that’s ok with me. The flight home, aside from being
delayed by a half hour or so (half of which was made up in the air),
was uneventful. Met by friends at the airport I wandered out to
dinner at an awsome chinese food place in New West. Yummy. I got
caught up on the latest scandals too (no, nothing I can tell you, but
wow, I leave for a few days and look what happens!).

Then it was Monday. What a day. Let me tell you about my day.

First of all, someone (die die die) stole the silver
“H” off the front of my car (H as in Honda of
course). I wandered out and it was gone. And while my car was in the
care of my parents the piece of trim that was flapping in the breeze
was removed. Feh. Now my once beautiful ‘lude is looking quite
abused. I really should look into that ’99 Prelude some more. Oh
wait, I don’t have $38,000. Now, if all my friends and relatives
chipped in and got me just the downpayment for it, I could handle the
monthly payments. Well, if I didn’t need a place to live or to eat
that is.

Then I spent half the day troubleshooting and finally arranging to go
onsite tomorrow to fix a modem problem. I don’t know what’s wrong. He
claims he didn’t change anything, but you know how that
goes. It just apparently stopped working. Without the system
connected to the net it’s hard to troubleshoot unless you’re onsite
though. So tomorrow I’ll head to Surrey to do just that. If he’s
screwed with something and broken it I swear I’ll beat him to death
with a NICS
Server. It’d better be a hardware problem or something.

So that was my morning. Then this afternoon I was charged with 2
simple tasks before getting onto the huge list of other shit I have to
do. Do some work for a guy, lets call him B. B gives me bad vibes,
lets just get that out of the way. The other guys in the office have
a good relationship with him it seems but I don’t like him, don’t like
the vibes he gives off, and would happily never do any work for him
again.

Anyway, I’m charged with setting the ETIs on his ISDN modem to auto.
This will eliminate the errors that BCTel/Telus/whatever they are
called now is getting and stop their equipment from resetting and
causing bad things like sloooooooooow connections and 40% packet
loss. I’m also in charge of using a Windows laptop to run this
control panel software from 3com (die die die) to set the system so
it’ll use both channels (something we can’t figure out how to do using
the AT command set), save the information to the modems non-volatile
RAM, and connect it back to our system so that both channels will be
used.

Pretty simple huh? In theory a half hour job. I started around 1:30,
figuring I’d leave lunch till after (why not relax completely and
enjoy my lunch instead of thinking about the work I have to go to
right after right?). I go in, check the settings for the TEIs. They
are set to 255 (the auto setting). Just to be sure I set them to 255
again, write (at&w) reset (atz, then atz! (to reset the modem
itself)), and run it. Works fine, but that’s not a real indication as
these errors are not all the time. So I call Al at Telus and get him
to check and he reports that since I made the changes (I didn’t
really) there are no errors.

Ok, no problem.

Next task. Connect laptop. Hmm…. the serial cable has the wrong
size of ends on it. Damn. Stew, call the office to see if they have
the right one, drive back, drive back to B’s place (he disappeared off
at some point in his silent way). Set up the software, connect to the
modem, and run it. It probes for the hardware, talks to it… keeps
talking to it… keeps talking to it…

Damn. Reset everything a few times but to no avail. Call the office
and talk to the boss a bit, try some things, no go. So we’ll just do
it manually. Try more things. No go. We can get the second channel
up but it’s not really up cause the connection is about 300
baud through syrup. Reset things back to the way they were.

B wanders in and asks about things. I explain what’s going on and he
asks about if it’s going to be fast or not (cause sometimes it’s fast
and sometimes it’s slow). He’s a really technical guy. No, he’s a
fscking moron when it comes to computers, but I’ll get back to that.
I try to show him how it’s going ok now and all I get is busy, busy
busy. His lame ass isp is busy. Who gets busy lines these days???
He says he has another account at another isp, should we try that. I
shrug, show him where to change it should he want to again (writing it
down in excruciating detail for him). Settings get changed, modem
dials in, works great. “Will the mail work?” Well, no. Our system
pulls the username/pass for the multi-drop pop from the isp info
fields, so unless we change that you have to get your mail from either
the same place as you get your bandwidth, or have the same
account/password at both places. So I explain that he either gets one
or the other. Ok, set it back. Ok, what’s your username and password
and dial up number? “I don’t know.”

ARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH

Isn’t it the clients duty to keep this shit and not mine to
go off finding a lame ass absolutely no info webpage or calling numbers to find
answering machines and guessing at what his password and login might
be? I didn’t think so. We finally figure it out though and I set it
back. I assume it’s working ok again. I only assume that because
it’s getting busy signals like before. I wasn’t there the required 6
hours for the busy signals to have a gap in them so I could see if it
connects. Hell, for all I know it’s connecting to a pizza joint in
Arkansas somewhere that just happened to be on the phone when it was
trying to dial out.

As the final bits of this all was getting resolved B is standing there
behind me talking to one of his flunkys and saying things like “I
think I should take this computer here, and here, and here [indicating the NICS
server and a couple of the other computers in the office] and put them
on the road, and then drive over them with my truck.” Right in front
of me!! Thanks a lot you asshole, for insulting my product, my
company, and me for something that’s a combination of your lame ass
ISP and your wanting to change something that was working fine.
Not us, our product or anything it does. Maybe it
has to do with the ISDN modem, but that’s 3com‘s fault for replacing
a good product with a shitty one.

I have much more to bitch about but I’d like to reboot and try out the
new q3Demo.

Will someone please tell the gas station by my house that the gas
price is 47.x and no 58.x? Sure it’s an arco (the Microsoft of gas
stations), but still…