|
|
|
hip experiment
Thursday, September 21 2017
The other day when I was having DSL problems and complained to Verizon, the guy on the other end of the phone convinced me that I needed to replace my three-year-old DSL modem for $60, a purchase I was only comfortable doing after he assured me that the new modem would have gigabit ports. But, as we now know, that DSL modem would not have gigabit ports, and I would ship it back. Still, I thought it good to have a working DSL router just to swap in now and then (and the one I'd converted to OpenWRT doesn't seem able to make a DSL connection despite the awesome open-source firmware). A search of eBay revealed the existence of used DSL modems with gigabit ports costing less than $15, and I bought one of these, an Actiontec Q1000, which promised to come with no power adapter or antennas (both of which I have in embarrassing quantities). It arrived today and I quickly realized why it might have been so cheap. There was no indication on the unit what DC voltage it required, though a Google search suggested that it needed 10 volts DC. In a case like this, 12 volts is always acceptable, so I tried plugging in a commodity 12 volt supply. But the jack's center pin was too thick for any adapter I could easily find. It would be easier to replace the jack with a more standard one than doing anything else. So I fired up the soldering iron and soon had that jack replaced with one salvaged from a dead WiFi router. But this didn't work. It soon appeared that the DSL router had a short somewhere between the ground and 10 volt line, though I couldn't determine where that was. At first I thought it was near where I'd installed the jack, so I cut through traces on the board to isolate that area, but the problem was somewhere further into the board. In the process of cutting a trace, the knife I was using slipped off the board and plunged into the tip of my left index finger, stopping somewhere under the fingernail. I let it bleed and then sprayed it with Bactrim and slathered it with an antibiotic salve before taping it up. [It would end up throbbing by this evening, but would mostly be healed and painless in less than 24 hours; the body evidently makes quick work of stabbing wounds.]
I probably should've given up on the router at that point, because it was the middle of my workday and my time is valuable. But I tried powering the router using just its USB port and the thing booted up. Or, at least, it seemed to based on the blinking lights. I couldn't connect to it via ethernet or WiFi. Perhaps those functions needed a voltage higher than the USB's five to work. I hooked up a serial adapter to its header and was able to get a verbose view of its boot sequence, suggesting there might be some hope in it yet (though it will probably be nothing but a time sink). Notice that in none of this did I consider sending the router back to the fucker on eBay who sent it to me. It would be more trouble than the money I could expect to be refunded. In a case like this, the better thing to do is just leave negative feedback and ignore the entreaties of the seller.
Yesterday while under the unexpected effects of marijuana, I got to thinking about the occasionally-nagging pain in my left hip, which has plagued me almost continuously since February. The only time it had gone away was when I was in Uganda, which had me thinking (in my altered state) that perhaps this was because I'd been taking a course of antibiotics at the time as a prophylaxis against malaria. Perhaps this had suppressed a bacterial infection in, say, my left vas deferens, much the way it had suppressed the symptoms in the known infections in Gretchen's fallopian tubes. Perhaps, in fact, such infections were the same culture of bacteria. Maybe it had all started with me back in February and had spread to Gretchen as a patient-zero sexually-transmitted disease, lodging in a homologous part of her body. Yesterday I'd told this theory to Gretchen, acknowledging that it was kooky. She agreed that it was kooky and unlikely, and then suggested perhaps the problem was just the nature of my seating. Another big difference between life in Hurley and life in Uganda is that in Hurley I spend many hours of my day seated in a dumpster-dived wheelchair, which I use as my office chair. Gretchen practically insisted that I try sitting in a different chair for a time to see if that helped in any way. So today I sat in Gretchen's swivel chair. It's not as comfy as my wheelchair, and it tends to make me lean more forward than I prefer. It also causes little irritated aches to appear in my upper shoulders, particularly when I'm doing something frustrating like typing ipconfig into a laptop in hopes of seeing evidence of communication with a craptastic DSL router. But I noticed something: the nagging pain in my left hip disappeared! I'm thinking that the hammock-like seat of the wheelchair causes me to put too much weight on the bony sides of my hips (which the "hammock" also acts to compress slightly in a horizontal direction). A conventional swivel chair, by contrast, supports my weight from the center of my buttocks. That can produce other problems, particularly in and around the anus, but it might be the healthiest alternative.
In the remote workplace, I found myself mostly working on an unexpected backend task: the creation of an XML feed used by The Organization's homepage for the display of products. The code I produced used the proprietary "framework" created by Meerkat, the erstwhile head of IT from over a year ago instead of WordPress libraries. This was because I intimately know the former and don't know much about the latter. Figuring that I might need to use such legacy code in other places, I pared it down to be as small as possible and to even use the wp-config.php file to get database credentials and such.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170921 feedback
previous | next |
