The Treehouse Blog

Well, I hope you and yours had a good Christmas as well. We just finished ours with my mother’s family last night, in fact. One complaint: Mom didn’t make egg nog this year.

Other than that, the settlement for the house is scheduled for this Friday. I was over there yesterday and the day before doing some sweeping, removing screws, and poking around. I’m building a firewall for the place, which is draining my stockpile of hardware (but that’s a good thing, right?). I’m trying WBEL3 on it. And school will be starting again before you know it.

It might not look too much different on the outside, but things are a bit cleaner on the inside. There’s also an RSS feed now, so those running their own scripts or hosting rogue conversions can feel free to stop ;). Excellent. Two items can be deleted from the Axim’s tasklist.

Merry Christmas!

I had an electrical model contradiction recently… Houses are supplied often with single-phase power… the poles in your neighborhood typically have a hot and a grounded neutral. Coming from your local transformer, you get three wires. I had assumed that you would get a 240, 120, and neutral. However, in my recent dealings with three-phase power, I came to realize that each row of breakers is fed by a different phase, rotating through them. As a result, your three phase breakers use three consecutive rows, obtaining all three phases. Household 240 breakers use two rows… so how does that work? That contradicts the transformer providing 240-to-neutral. Answer: split–phase. Since it’s not phases, but two transformed currents from the same phase, they can be added via series to get your 240. Wow.

HTML, and its derivatives, hate me more as time goes by. I could understand tables, mostly. These new-fangled CSS things drive me crazy with their multitude of implementations, and lack of apparent usefulness. Web site design isn’t programming… it’s alchemy. So, maybe I’ll get a better site up over break, and maybe I won’t.

General update: the car is fixed, closing on the house will be sooner rather than later, and grades will be ready to look at well before I’m ready to look at them. Fun.

Today the Axim refused to connect via Wifi. Thinking about it, I realized that this hadn’t been tried since I had attempted to connect with a Bluetooth WAP a few days earlier. Trying everything in the configuration, and reading over sites didn’t help at all. So, I looked into firmware updates and found that I could upgrade from A02 to A05. I did so, and wireless worked in the “clean” install, but didn’t again when I restored my backup. Then I dug through the Windows folder and ran the WirelessPower executable, which fixed things right up. I should have tried that earlier… the Dell WLAN Utility was showing that the wireless card was not present, but I would have never thought this executable would have been the only way to power it up. Oh well. I have new firmware now :).