The party went very well, I acquainted new folks with the warm and wonderful feeling of drinking Cachaça cocktails at the party. Also, the tamales rocked the house, though I personally wish, as host, that we’d had some veggie tamales ready at the same time the meat ones were.

Read on for updates on the DSL situation and for info on the venerable sp(l)udger, a tool you may or may not know exists.

Okay, no more teasing. The sp(l)udger is a pick/punch tool used in home networking. I use it to remove previously punched down wires from ethernet/phone jacks, but apparently it can also serve as an emergency punchdown tool. If it has other uses, I’d like to know them. Here’s a link to a picture of the tool and some blurb that doesn’t use the “l” to spell it.

Verizon DSL updates:

• Still sucking mightily. I located where the actual wire’s entering my house. It isn’t the Network Interface Device (grey box bolted to side of house), but directly into the house, with some exposed posts bolted to my ceiling over the toilet in the basement.
• Verizon support, when I called to say the modem they sent me isn’t helping, said they need to walk me through configuring it properly or else I will get disconnections. Maybe it will help, who knows? I will deal with that when I get home tonight.
• Have noticed that one of the problems with DSL at my house have to do with the modem connecting then disconnecting rapidly. Verizon support asserts they are near certain this is my sole problem, but I am not so sure.
• Verizon telephone tech is still scheduled to show at my house on Thursday. Am not yet certain I will be able to be at home for that, but need to meet with boss to hammer that out.
• Am attempting consultation with boss to see if he thinks I should order another way of getting the bandwidth to my house. Verizon FIOS has been suggested by co-workers, but is not available in my neighborhood. Comcast cable is a possibility, but I am more likely, honestly to go for Speakeasy DSL instead, on a dedicated line.
• Have spoken with technical sales at Speakeasy and am reassured that they would be more likely to help resolve such situations than Verizon is.

Other updates:

• Am loaning my Wii to a friend/co-worker for a while. I hope it ends up being good for him, and that it ends up working out and nothing bad happens to it while it’s out of my hands. I’m marginally worried it’ll get stolen out of my office/cube while I have it here in a bag. That would suck. Not so worried about it once Mike has it. Just had lunch with hm and am reassured anyhow.
• I appear to have helped roll in an update to SharePoint 2003 that has borked part of SharePoint 2003. My dumb-ass fault for apparently forgetting to test a “known issue” with the patch even though I implemented it in Test first. Oops. Hopefully we can fix it. I have apologized profusely but still feel like a Benedict Arnold. EDITED: This is now fixed in our production environment, thanks to my co-worker, Jim, and no one seems particularly bothered, since I apologized profusely.

Tags:   adsl · batida · cachaca · caipirinha · party · speakeasy · spludger · tamales · tools · verizon2 Comments