Week of 13th July, 2009

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Monday, 13th July

New shift starts today - a 10 o'clock start, swapped from an early. My colleague and I are still swapping shifts as required, but it's on an ad hoc basis, rather than a blanket change

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Tuesday, 14th July

A reasonably successful two days - but we're running up against throughput problems transferring material in and out of Final Cut Pro. We can transfer a maximum of 2 packages simultaneously into Final Cut, and another two out. This is not enough, but much extra hardware has to be put in to get more simultaneous transfers, and the bean-counters want proof of payback within an unreasonably short time before they'll spring the money.

How does "Black to air unless you pay over" have a quantifiable payback date?

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Wednesday, 15th July

Another router restart this morning, after a link drop. I've had at least one of those before, but ppp re-established itself with no problem. Not this time. Data rate is now 11,725,900/815,700. On the evidence, a 50-odd% increase in modem sync rate, which I don't see reflected in throughput, isn't worth the pain.

Several home tasks completed: a parcel for Sarah collected from the local delivery office; had my tame garage check out the problem with Hopalong's lights - it's the switch, and they aren't available new; arranged to source a second-hand part; tried to get Hopalong's exhaust fixed - exhaust place too busy for me to be able to get back in time for piano tuner's visit, so tomorrow; 'phoned plumber re. leaking shower unit.

And the damned router renegotiated it's datarate again - transparently, this time. Now 12,029,200/824,000.

And the piano tuner is late.

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Thursday, 16th July

Rig programming appears to have worked, insofar as there are a bunch of memories with data in them. They're not usable, as yet, because the alpha-tagging, that would display the repeater callsign on the rig screen, is invisible, so all I have is a bunch of memories identified by frequency - and because of frequency reuse there are several apparently identical entries. There's no visible option in the rig menus to say "display alpha tags", you have to do it by setting an option in FTB8900, and reloading the memories - I think. I need to do this, the memories are effectively useless without it.

Got the 'phone call from the piano tuner this morning. Very apologetic: apparently he had flight probems returning from eastern Europe, and didn't get home until midnight last night. So we rearranged the tuning for this afternoon.

Then out to the exhaust place - just as busy, but less time pressure, so I left Hopalong with them so that they could check him out as and when they had ramp space - 2 hours? Some window-shopping, and a bacon and egg roll and coffee passed the time.

Turns out that a small gasket - the one between the exhaust manifold and the downpipe - is burned out. Of course, they don't stock it, but can get one for tomorrow. Which doesn't help much since I'm not now free until Tuesday. So I'll return then.

Postie delivered a box this morning, addressed to me, but marked with the brand-name of a well-known hair care product company. WTF? I haven't ordered any shampoo or such-like thing. Well, it's addressed to me, so I'll open it.

And it's the light switch for Hopalong. Good service, that. I ordered this yesterday, by 'phone. Return of post, even. Now to see if it fits - that'll be Tuesday as well, after the exhaust fix.

And so back home, for lunch and to wait for the piano tuner. Who turned up at the arranged time, and did his thing. It's been two years, so the instrument needed a good deal of careful attention - as usual, tuned a semitone low to reduce the risk of string breakage.

After that, I decided that, with our upcoming holiday in the North of England - near Alnwick, Yorkshire, to be precise - I wanted the capability to be online at any arbitrary time, from (almost) anywhere. This means 3G mobile broadband. I won't need it much, but when I do need it, I'll need it bad. So a contract is overkill, since most of the bundled data would be wasted. Not to mention the draconian charges if I overrun the bundled data allowace. No, Pay-As-You-Go is better for me - the link stops dead when you reach the end of your purchased data

Eventually, I want this in the car, so I need a router. Only two companies offer such a thing - T-Mobile and Hutchison 3. The two are merging their networks, so I'd be using the same towers whichever I choose. The Three router is a small cuboid box, as compared with the disc-shaped T-Mobile device. Small cuboids are easier to put in a box, particularly if you remove the outer casing, and Three do a variety of starter packs - USB 3g modem, and a data bundle.

So I opted for the Three package - Huawei D100 router, Three branded, Huawei E156G USB 3g modem, and 12GB of data transfer, valid for a year. Total, just shy of UKP150.

Of course, my local Three store didn't have the routers in stock. I ended up travelling to the Westfield Centre, in Shepherd's Bush, about 10 miles (15 minutes on the Tube) away. And the Three store there didn't have a router either. But they have an open-plan stall on the next level up, and the stall had two. Routers only in white, unfortunately (I'd have preferred black) but the E156G dongle was available in black, so I had one of them.

Lucky that this is Thursday, and the Westfield Centre is open until 10 p.m. All that remains is to test it. I have 3 days cooling-off period if it doesn't work, so I need to be reasonably quick.

E-mail today brought news that Vol 2 of  J.M. Straczynski's "Asked and Answered" Q&A series is released, at the usual price - $29.95 until Wed 21st July, $39.95 thereafter, plus shipping, from here. My order is in, of course.

So a busy, but successful, day. I hope the weekend is as good, especially the overtime on Monday.

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Friday, 17th July

Another ADSL line renegotiate failed this afternoon. This was at about 4 p.m. and ppp did not reconnect. I had to do a router restart when I got home from work. Datarate is now 11,557,300/815,700.

This is getting ridiculous. I can't believe that Postie would try to push out an upgrade that's as flaky as this, so there must be a problem at my end. And it almost has to be the router. Draytek's customer fora require login just to read, let alone post, so I can't read about any problems seen by other users.

But Draytek's support pages are readable, and they recommend G.DMT as the modulation technique. So I set that and rebooted. And my datarate has fallen to 7,680,000/896,000 - which is similar to what I had before the ADSL2+ 'upgrade'. I'll leave it at that for a while, and see what the link stability is like.

I'm using an old firmware version (2.7.1) whereas the current version for this (now discontinued) router is 2.8.2. But previous experience leads me to be very chary of breaking the box with a firmware upgrade. I bricked a NetGear DG-814 that way.

This snafu led to my missing a comics download. But it's still before midnight as I type this, so I should be able to recover by invoking the script manually.

<pause>

And that worked.

CafePress have sent e-mail - JMS' "Asked and Answered, Vol. 2" has shipped. That's quick. It may even be here before we leave for Yorkshire next Friday - although I doubt that. Quite happy to be surprised, though.

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Saturday, 18th July

Builder/plumber attended to fix the loft shower unit - leaking shut-off valve, so replacement unit needed. Supply and fit new unit, UKP220 - cash. So that's good.

I took the Acer in to work, today, to attempt some personal work while the ingest system did it's thing. And I succeeded. It turns out that the FT-8900 can display the alpha tag stored in a memory - but it's a button fugue to do it, and it needs done per memory. For 300-odd memories? I don't think so. But FTB8900 knows how to do this, so I edited the memory image I loaded last weekend, and loaded it again. And the memories work, as required - alpha tags all present and displayed. Result.

Then on to the mobile broadband. First, install the modem, a Huawei E156G, on the Acer. The modem has a flash memory inside it that holds the required software - just plug it in and it installs a "CD drive". Inside that you find an Autorun.exe file - or, if so be as you haven't turned off Autorun, this file will execute. In either case the installation proceeds - painlessly.

Once the 3 Connect dashboard software started, I could connect, and browse web pages. I could also send SMS texts - in particular, my Nokia now knows the dongle's mobile number. This confirms basic working.

Now for the router. Which fired straight up, and was visible wirelessly. I did a bit of configuring via the supplied Ethernet cable, which is easier to do down a wire, rather than changing parameters of the wireless link, via that link - the which smacks of sawing off the tree branch you're sitting on. Basically, I changed the ESSID from the default, and upped the security from WEP to WPA2-PSK. And I can browse the web via 3g dial-on-demand - which is near-instant, I won't need an always-on connection if this is typical. It may, of course, not be - there is much anecdotal evidence that Three's data service is either brilliant or atrocious. There seems to be no middle ground. And their customer service is routinely slated. Which is no real surprise.

Their coverage maps also seem to be overly optimistic, again from anecdotal evidence. The area around Holy Island, near Berwick-upon-Tweed (where we're going next week) claims good mobile broadband coverage. We shall see - as long as I can get my comics (just in case the Vigor router doesn't) I'll be a happy bunny. Long term, the kit will be doing mostly M2M data transfers, between the car and a server at home.

Mem: must make a list of all the URLs I'll need for this - maybe bookmark them?

After those successes, work was a bit of an anticlimax. Shortform work, except for the music videos - is complete. Musics are slow, because of file transfers to and from Final Cut being slow. Missing lists are empty until at least 18:00 tomorrow.

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Sunday, 19th July

OK, Three... Tell me why you feel it acceptable for your #$@ Connection Manager to try to dial a non-existent (Not Plugged In) 3g connection when I have a perfectly good hardwired connection to my home network. And to continue to do this even after I've uninstalled the pesky thing... 

Now I'm off to work. ADSL seems stable, 24+ hours after voluntarily downgrading to an "Up to 8Mbit" connection.

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