The Treehouse Blog

Getting some stuff done this labor day, or trying to. Washed and vacuumed the car, swapped out the radio for the one from Chris’s car (now I have a working tape deck, woo!), put a tarp over part of the treehouse’s roof (need to put another one there, too), and so forth. This wasn’t all I did though. We had a breakfast picnic for Katelyn’s birthday on Sunday morning (she’ll be 16…) and today I went hiking on the Tuscarora Trail near Cowan’s Gap state park. The view from the overlook was rather dismal, given that it was all fog/cloud, no vista. It did rain a bit on me on the return trip. I took a different route home… and guess what was along the side of the road? No, not a rattlesnake. A coax repeater hut! In a forested area near state forest land! An expedition will be planned shortly, I’m sure.

Despite my mother unplugging the phone line before the storm got very close, my newer ISDN TA got fried hard. The old one is back in place at the moment, all quirks included. I was driving home when it was storming, and a lightning strike was visible directly ahead of me (probably in the field, maybe half a mile away). A second or so later I briefly smelled unhappy electronics smell in my car… nothing seemed unhappy though, hopefully it was the cables along the road. We didn’t have any power problems (except blips) at home, but AT&T had at least one nearby site down most of the evening. Doug called after the storm had passed to say that they had lost phone and power, a good while after the storm had passed them. The tornado potential kept the local news on the air until 8PM.

Despite what Doug says, I really enjoyed most of that hike! Well, except the part about wondering if the road was actually a river. It’d be good if DCNR put out some maps where mountain-sized hills aren’t displayed as two elevation lines. Besides, Ian, Isaac and Chris all have similar stories and I don’t hear them complaining (well, very often, anyway) :).

Now that’s what you call a non-trivial pile of Cisco! The 3550s (qty: 45) are all for ResNET. The 2950s (qty: 70) are all for campus. The whole order is meant to facilitate deployment of “Campus Manager” (someone’s proprietary software on their black-box linux machine) throughout campus. Somehow this is all supposed to get done before the start of the semester, despite the fact that Campus Manager hasn’t arrived yet.

Ship isn’t the only thing doing replacements. I purchased a 3361 off of eBay to replace my 3360 that has the squeeze-hard-to-make-display-visible and the characters-are-inverted-or-something issues. Moving my account to the new phone was relatively painless… call in, they tell you to turn old phone off, power on new phone (that’s already AT&T-ified) and dial a special (probably one-time) number. Just about instant.

Lastly, Doug forwarded me an e-mail from Dennis saying that the Kodak DX-7630 6.1 MPixel camera was on insane sale at Office Max. Although $250 for a $400 camera is a great deal, the Office Max experience was a bit of a pain. First, it was in-store only. Carlisle didn’t have any in stock. Their default warehouse (queried thru a Unisys amber-CRT terminal) had none either. Their raincheck system (a web browser based thing in the back of the store) wouldn’t work either. But, the manager used the Unisys again and is getting one shipped to me from Denver. I just hope it can do landscape shots as well as Doug’s can.

LAN party tomorrow… getting ready.

Monday, Doug and I hiked up to Lewis Rocks, or what Ian calls South Mountain Falls… both names are equally applicable. The lighting was awesome, and we got some great wallpaper photos. Wow, my camera is pitiful in quality compared with Doug’s ;).

Tuesday, the last piece (motherboard) arrived for my Oak upgrade. I proceeded without much problem (except for nearly destroying the processor via misapplied heatsink… my thanks to the A7V8X motherboard for shutting the machine off when it detects the processor is about to melt…). Oak is much faster processing-wise, and transfer speeds have improved, but are not quite at the media-limiting point.

Isaac and Ange organized a Capture the Flag event, which I was able to attend. I think they had 16 people at peak, divided over two teams. We got three games in between around 11:00 and 1:30. Due to the moon, only the last game was *really* dark. And this morning, the family went to the Silver Springs Flea Market. I didn’t get anything except for my usual breakfast sausage… most of my past purchases had been junk for treehouse assimilation, and that pretty much came to an end when I started working.

Well, I spent (wasted?) most of the evening working on my Thinkpad R40 review, which, no, isn’t yet done.

That having been said, Ship got new toys to plug into toys, including a huge Brocade SilkWorm 12000 switch. All I have to say is… I hope it supports SNMP.