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bossing like a boss
Monday, September 25 2017
The mailman (who was smoking a cigarette Mitch-Mitchell-in-his-prime stylee) delivered yet another DSL Router today. This one was a Netgear DGND3700v2, a device with much more computational firepower than the crappy Verizon-branded DLink router I'd been using. It also really does have gigabit ethernet ports, an essential feature if one plans to use one of the USB ports for network-attached storage (which I might some day). I set it all up and configured it to connect to Verizon DSL, but, try as I might, I couldn't get it to make a connection. To my understanding, the DSL protocol doesn't provide much useful information about why a connection fails, so I assumed it was an authentication error. Perhaps I was getting the DSL password wrong. So I called up Verizon to have them reset the password. I knew this was going to be a long call when the woman on the other end asked, "What model of router do you have?" I immediately became impatient, saying that this didn't matter, that the password I needed to reset was the DSL one, the one that connected my router to Verizon's equipment. "You mean the WiFi password?" the tech support woman asked. It was that kind of call. Eventually, though, she managed to figure out what I was talking about and she reset it. But still I couldn't make the connection happen. I did eventually get the new router to work, but for some reason I had to run its stupid hand-holdy wizard (designed for grandmothers and 'tards). I don't know exactly what it did (and it certainly didn't tell me) but it got the connection working. So now I have gigabit ethernet (and two USB ports) all the way down into the boiler room.
In the remote workplace today my signature achievement was composing an email to the head of another department in hopes of taking the pressure off my two backend developers. I wrote a first version and then went over it in several passes, sanding off the rough edges with each. As I wrote, it focused my mind on the problem at hand, leading me to reach out to Nicole to see if one of her new frontend developers might be able to lend a hand in the design of an application for which this other department was proving incapable of communicating a vision. I don't like this sort of messy political work and much prefer the predictable world of computers (even though they too are becoming increasingly messy). But as I wrote the email and conducted interpersonal research via Slack, I realized that I'm not actually all that bad at this work if I give it some attention. As I put it to Nicole at one point, "I'm bossing like a boss." ("Like a boss" is a newish phrase meaning "exceptionally well and with brio.")
Meanwhile Gretchen drove into Kingston on her own today, her first set of errands since hospitalization. The main errand was to get a back massage, with the view to squeezing out all of "the hospital" from her somewhat-atrophied muscles.
It's proving to be a hot, muggy late September, though I nevertheless took a hot bath using the 150 degree solar-heated water in our household hot water system. It didn't take much of that to make a comfortable bath.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
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