Waaa waaa someone call the wambulance. What a lot of whining there is in the previous posts. Now for something completely different.
I subscribed to DSL with Orcon and received my Siemens DSL modem. Yay for convergence -- it's a DSL modem, router and wireless hub all in one. You plug it in, and configure it using a wired connection. The configuration software is a breeze. All done in under five minutes.
Performance seems good, although we might have a few dead spots around the house when using a wireless connection.
There's no phone jack in our office downstairs so for now the DSL modem is sitting in a corner in the playroom. The attentive reader might wonder if I am deliberately careless (spilling coffee on laptops, putting cell phones in my back pocket while roller blading, putting DSL modems in children's play areas) but it's only for a little while... until we get an electrician to install a jack in our office. What could possibly go wrong?
Monday, 23 April 2007
Inventing things
My son Tyler likes to come up with all sorts of inventions. Sometimes he says that when he is a grown up he'll invent something to do XYZ. At breakfast I told him that he doesn't have to wait until he's grown up -- he can invent things now. Of course, he might not be able to make certain things until he is older, but he can still have ideas.
He was gazing into his bowl of cereal and came up with an idea: a bed with mosquito net and snack facilities. He said "Sometimes I get crazy ideas from my cereal and I don't know how to make them." I suppose gazing into a bowl of water was good enough for Nostradamus, so maybe a bowl of cereal is not such a bad place to get inspiration.
He was gazing into his bowl of cereal and came up with an idea: a bed with mosquito net and snack facilities. He said "Sometimes I get crazy ideas from my cereal and I don't know how to make them." I suppose gazing into a bowl of water was good enough for Nostradamus, so maybe a bowl of cereal is not such a bad place to get inspiration.
Alas poor cell phone
Sigh, another mishap with consumer electronics. I carefully put my cell phone in my back pocket while roller blading since I usually fall forwards. Just as I got back to the car, I fell right on my butt and wrenched the flip off screen off the phone. I also hurt my butt.
Quick trip to the Vodaphone store and now I have anew phone. Something very basic. Their cheapo flip open phones looked flimsy or were too expensive. I got a simple phone with exposed keyboard. It's simple to lock the keyboard but my concern was that previous phones I have had like that can dial emergency services by accident. In the US you have to be able to dial 911 from a phone at any time so when you "lock" the keyboard it means you can only dial a 9 or a 1. Ads on the sides of buses tell you to lock your phone to avoid false calls to 911, but locking it actually increases the odds of misdialing. The sales rep assured me that wasn't the case in NZ, but now that I play with the phone, I see that it is. If the keyboard is locked and you dial 111 it pops up asking if you want to place the call. Probably a bit less likely to fail.
Poor old Motorola, you served me well. From petrochemicals you came. To petrochemicals you shall return (by way of the instore recycling service).
Quick trip to the Vodaphone store and now I have anew phone. Something very basic. Their cheapo flip open phones looked flimsy or were too expensive. I got a simple phone with exposed keyboard. It's simple to lock the keyboard but my concern was that previous phones I have had like that can dial emergency services by accident. In the US you have to be able to dial 911 from a phone at any time so when you "lock" the keyboard it means you can only dial a 9 or a 1. Ads on the sides of buses tell you to lock your phone to avoid false calls to 911, but locking it actually increases the odds of misdialing. The sales rep assured me that wasn't the case in NZ, but now that I play with the phone, I see that it is. If the keyboard is locked and you dial 111 it pops up asking if you want to place the call. Probably a bit less likely to fail.
Poor old Motorola, you served me well. From petrochemicals you came. To petrochemicals you shall return (by way of the instore recycling service).
Friday, 20 April 2007
Coffee + keyboard = :(
We've all spilled something on our keyboards, I am sure but yesterday was a real doozy. I knocked almost an entire cup of coffee on the keyboard of my laptop. I immediately turned it upside down to drain things out and turned it off for a bit. I popped off some keycaps and mopped things up. It didn't seem well. I had to go to an interview so I left it to dry.
When I returned it seemed OK except that the control key was stuck. That turned out to be Sticky Keys (a Windows accessibility feature). Thank you Mr Google for that pointer. A few keys are dead though, including the 3/# key which makes it difficult to say C# in your resume (C InsertSymbol move-mouse double-click OK).
Something tells me my laptop will be seeing a doctor soon. Anyway, it motivated me to set up my desktop computer again. Amazingly I still remembered my password (two passwords ago). Took about one minute to get it connected to our DSL wireless modem. Woo hoo. Dual mon again. Now I can be 30% more effective.
When I returned it seemed OK except that the control key was stuck. That turned out to be Sticky Keys (a Windows accessibility feature). Thank you Mr Google for that pointer. A few keys are dead though, including the 3/# key which makes it difficult to say C# in your resume (C InsertSymbol move-mouse double-click OK).
Something tells me my laptop will be seeing a doctor soon. Anyway, it motivated me to set up my desktop computer again. Amazingly I still remembered my password (two passwords ago). Took about one minute to get it connected to our DSL wireless modem. Woo hoo. Dual mon again. Now I can be 30% more effective.
Washing machine blues
Sigh. Probably if you calculated the mean time between failures we're not doing any worse than usual. The problem is that we have had to buy a whole lot of things upon arrival in New Zealand.
Our washing machine lasted a few days then started complaining about OE. The manual says that means it couldn't drain ("(O)utlet (E)rror"?) and that you had to open a door, drain a hose, poke around inside. I wouldn't have been surprised to find sticks, stones, acorns, pretty shells etc but all seemed clear. A technician came out expecting to find something but didn't. Of course, when he was here it started working again. Two loads later it died. One new drain pump later and all is good.
I must say that for the most part I have been impressed with the quality of service when things go wrong.
Our washing machine lasted a few days then started complaining about OE. The manual says that means it couldn't drain ("(O)utlet (E)rror"?) and that you had to open a door, drain a hose, poke around inside. I wouldn't have been surprised to find sticks, stones, acorns, pretty shells etc but all seemed clear. A technician came out expecting to find something but didn't. Of course, when he was here it started working again. Two loads later it died. One new drain pump later and all is good.
I must say that for the most part I have been impressed with the quality of service when things go wrong.
Car Stereo
As soon as we arrived in New Zealand, we headed to a Toyota dealership to buy a Toyota Prius hybrid. Petrol in NZ is rather expensive. It was a second-hand import (very common in NZ since Japan also drives on the left) so most of the display and many of the controls are in Japanese. The onboard computer has useful functions like where to find the nearest golf course (in Japan) and the GPS is hilariously confused about where we are (off the map as far as it is concerned).
Anyway, it had a cassette deck (!) but no CD player. I told them I wanted a CD player installed under the screen in the empty bay. When I took delivery they had installed a multi-loader in the boot (== trunk). There was a little display between the steering wheel and the driver's door, but most functions had to be accessed using a remote control. Atfer a few days we were going crazy. Obviously the driver can't operate a remote control while driving, and the passengers can't either. Plus every time we put the stroller into the boot or take it out we risk clobbering the multiloader. I called the dealership and expressed my profound dissatisfaction. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the player stopped working.
Once we had finished house hunting, we scheduled it for servicing. I took the car to the dealership to be fixed. What followed was like something out of Fawlty Towers -- confusion all round about who was fixing what, exactly where my car was (at an independent stereo installation place), confusion about what they were doing (they thought they were fixing the multiloader). After some firm insistence we have...ta da a nice single disc CD player that lets a passenger pop in a CD.
The trade off was that we lost the use of the screen. The only function I ever used was the fuel economy report, and I would only look at that occasionally out of geeky interest. The screen isn't completely dead though -- it still flashes up a safety warning -- or at least the first two characters mean "safety" in Chinese. I could probably puzzle out some of the rest given a dictionary and sufficient time.
We had to get a few other things fixed. In the course of (re)learning to parallel park on the other side of the street we managed to scrape off some of those lead wheel balancing things that they attach to the rim of the wheel. And the kids had stress tested the cup holder.
After driving only a Prius for a few months, it was strange to drive a conventional Toyota Corolla when we visited family in Christchurch last week. When you stop at lights, the petrol engine doesn't turn off. How strange is that?
Anyway, it had a cassette deck (!) but no CD player. I told them I wanted a CD player installed under the screen in the empty bay. When I took delivery they had installed a multi-loader in the boot (== trunk). There was a little display between the steering wheel and the driver's door, but most functions had to be accessed using a remote control. Atfer a few days we were going crazy. Obviously the driver can't operate a remote control while driving, and the passengers can't either. Plus every time we put the stroller into the boot or take it out we risk clobbering the multiloader. I called the dealership and expressed my profound dissatisfaction. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the player stopped working.
Once we had finished house hunting, we scheduled it for servicing. I took the car to the dealership to be fixed. What followed was like something out of Fawlty Towers -- confusion all round about who was fixing what, exactly where my car was (at an independent stereo installation place), confusion about what they were doing (they thought they were fixing the multiloader). After some firm insistence we have...ta da a nice single disc CD player that lets a passenger pop in a CD.
The trade off was that we lost the use of the screen. The only function I ever used was the fuel economy report, and I would only look at that occasionally out of geeky interest. The screen isn't completely dead though -- it still flashes up a safety warning -- or at least the first two characters mean "safety" in Chinese. I could probably puzzle out some of the rest given a dictionary and sufficient time.
We had to get a few other things fixed. In the course of (re)learning to parallel park on the other side of the street we managed to scrape off some of those lead wheel balancing things that they attach to the rim of the wheel. And the kids had stress tested the cup holder.
After driving only a Prius for a few months, it was strange to drive a conventional Toyota Corolla when we visited family in Christchurch last week. When you stop at lights, the petrol engine doesn't turn off. How strange is that?
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