zen.org Communal Weblog

So. B’s in San Fran. And I’m home with P. And…the DSL box dies. A quick, sudden death. No lights, not even power. Can you say PANIC?! I mean, what am I supposed to do with NO INTERNET?!

Talking to B, it turns out that Declan, our friend up the road, has his brother-in-law’s old dsl box. I RUN up the road. Plug it in. And start geeking. Man, this is frustrating. It took a day and a half, 4 phone calls to Eircom (“We’ve never had that DSL box model…are you sure that’s the right model?” Yes, I’m sure, and we’ve had it for 3 freaking years, and you got it for us!!) Finally got Eamonn’s box working, and I have access. And at the same time, eircom (fondly called eircon by most of the net community in Ireland) finally realized that they were supposed to replace our dsl box a while ago with a Netopia. So that’s in the post now (supposedly…). Using the word supposedly is a requirement when speaking about eircom.

So I’m back up. 77 messages waiting for me. And I still don’t have all the normal features that I did with the other box. But I just have to wait for B to get back and finish the full install of the box.

If I can just get eircom out here to fix their shoddy wiring where the dsl comes into the house, then we’ll be all set. Oh, don’t hold your breath….

Sent to David Farber’s Interesting People mailing list:

“United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of
turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong
terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from
Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their
ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the
Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in
President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional
processes in South Vietnam.”

– Peter Grose, in a page 2 New York Times article titled, ‘U.S.Encouraged by Vietnam Vote,’ September 4, 1967.

Though I have nothing interesting to say, I just could not let a Wiccan holiday I remembered go by without saying something. So Merry Imbolc.

I tried to round up a group of people at work to go to a local pub for lunch and toast Punxsutawney Phil, but I had no takers. Sigh.

Here, where I work, two Japanese gentleman are visiting to learn about one of the projects I’m on. I think I impressed them as yesterday I was given a script to demo for them a few hours before the demo. I did my best to test it in an artificial environment, but when the real demo came around in the correct environment it did not work well. The demo turned into a shell script debugging lesson, but in the end all worked out.

A little while ago, today, they asked me a Windows question. How to copy a file from the Debian system to there Windows laptop. As they where using PuTTY as a terminal I just got pscp.exe. I launced a DOS prompt and then looked at the keyboard. It was Japanese, giving up on stumbling through the Japanese directory name I had to relinquish the keyboard and dictate. Again, all went well, but the language barrier was there the entire time.

Maybe I should of just gotten FileZilla instead.