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appropriate stone shelf
Wednesday, July 8 2009
Verizon runs a broadband monopoly in my neighborhood, though they don't even know that they do. If you have a problem with their DSL and can get a real human on the phone, you can always threaten to leave them for Road Runner Cable or even AOL dialup and the guy on the other end will automatically transition to the deal-cutting part of his flowchart, completely unaware that you are only bluffing. This morning the internet was behaving very poorly so I gave them a call, wading through the menus that ask such irrevelavant questions as the nature of my operating system. The problem was most definitely far upstream in the electronic large intestine of what Verizon controls. Indeed, my DSL line was behaving correctly and giving me the reassuringly-impressive figures of
3360 Kb/s downstream and
320 Kb/s upstream, but I was not being assigned an IP address, meaning they were having server problems. The most-robotic-sounding part of the Verizon voice menu came during the hold before being transferred to a purported human, and it told me that Wheaton, Maryland was suffering problems, as were business users in New York and DSL users in New York State (that's me) but that work was being done to fix the problem. I thought I'd just stay on the line anyway, but that didn't turn out to be an option. In the past if you joined the queue for tech support, you might wait six hours, but eventually you'd get to talk to somebody. But Verizon doesn't work that way any more. The robot told me that there was too much call volume and I'd have to call back later. Within a few minutes my internet healed itself. Recently I'd seen a relationship between thunderstorms and the absence of DSL reliability, but this problem was probably unrelated to weather.
I'd pretty much given up on trying exotic ways to improve the range of the household DECT 6.0 base station or handsets, deciding that the stock range and reception of the units was suitable for a greenhouse-sited handset so long as that handset was in the correct part of the greenhouse. There is a large DECT 6.0 dead zone near the western wall (the wall nearest the house), though the eastern wall mostly has clear line-of-site to the house through the double-glazed south wall and the phone works okay there. So I just needed a permanent place to locate the phone. So today I built a shelf from bluestone. The shelf itself would be a perfect piece of natural bluestone I'd found; it measured about eight by three inches, was a half inch thick, and was almost perfectly rectangular. To support this, I used the wet saw to cut out two small isosceles right triangles. Then I bored holes edgewise through my triangles so I could screw them to the greenhouse's east wall (which, above a chest level, is either glass or Wonderboard-surface carpentry). I glurped wet Portland cement onto the wall before attaching the shelf so it the cement would form solid "sockets" around the brackets to keep them from rotating around their screws. Portland cement also ended up being the only adhesive holding the shelf itself. The shelf was a perfect detail for the greenhouse, matching the rough stone interior. It was also the perfect location for the phone, a place where it could easily receive pages from other handsets on the system (its principal greenhouse function).
At some point today I watched a fascinating episode of Nova about the relationship between the brain and music as demonstrated by people with abnormal brains. There was a young blind man with autism who could, on hearing a recording of a musical piece once, play it back verbatim (with or without variations). There was another young man severely afflicted by Tourette syndrome who found he could conquer his debilitating tics by drumming. Then there was a woman who found all music irritating and similar-sounding. And there was also a guy who'd never been particularly musical until one day he was struck by lightning and found a strange new interest in classical piano. As one might expect, Oliver Sacks was the chief scientific touchstone on all these cases. I love shows like this that show how complicated, nuanced, flexible, and fragile the human brain actually is. Not only is it a wonder that more of us aren't debilitated by insanity, it's also strange that more of us don't have wildly esoteric talents.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?090708 feedback
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