For everyone who asked, I’m fine now. The illness only lasted about 24 hours and once I had enough sleep, I was OK.

Our house in Taipei is on floors 5 and 6 of our building, the top two levels. Our phone lines come into the 5th floor and then there’s a cable that connects up to the 6th floor phone jacks. My computer room is up on the 6th floor where the fax/adsl line goes. The cordless phone base station is in the study area off of Emily’s room on the 5th floor. I have a VOIP account with Packet 8 as well, and it connects to the network upstairs and then was routed over the house wiring to the phone downstairs.

That worked OK, but there was a little bit of noise on the line. It wasn’t much at first, but it got worse over time, until sometime in May it got to the point where it would be unusable at times. So I needed to find out the problem and fix it. The first problem was finding out where the cables were routed. I finally figured that all out, and found that almost every pair between upstairs and downstairs was flaky. It’s amazing that the ADSL line managed to keep working under the circumstances.

That meant having to run a new line between upstairs and downstairs. While I was at it, I decided to put in an ethernet line as well so that I could put network stuff downstairs in the future. (There’s already an ethernet drop running to the front of the 5th floor for wi-fi, but the back of the house didn’t have any network drop.) This involved going to the SL store to get cables, jacks, cable ties, and a monster drill bit to make holes in the walls. For the phone lines they had four conductor cables, and I got some cat 5 cabling for the ethernet drop. I planned to run two phone cables and one network cable, which would allow for one network drop and up to four analog phone lines.

I decided to have the cables take a fairly direct route from the computer room through the wall to the stairwell, down the wall, and through the wall again into the study area. Drilling the holes went remarkably smoothly, as did feeding the bundle of three cables through. The hardest part of that was getting the cables to lie neatly and then get the cable ties nailed down.

I got the main house line and the adsl line going up through the new cables, and once the adsl line was over on that line, I cut out the link between the 5th and 6th floors on the inside wiring. I routed the VOIP back down over the other line and hooked it up to the phone, and when I tried it out, the sound was crystal clear! Success.

Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy! Getting the network cable working was another matter. Though I bought what looked like two identical RJ45 jacks, they turned out to have completely different layouts for the connects inside. I wired things up with identical color schemes to match the labels on each end, then plugged a patch cable from one end into the switch, and on the downstairs end another patch cable to the laptop.

On the laptop, I disabled the wifi port and enabled the ethernet port, and then sat staring while it waited at “Acquiring network address”. Suspecting something wrong with the DHCP server, I set it up in debug mode and found that it was seeing and answering the requests correctly. That seemed not to be the problem. Then I replaced the switch upstairs with a different one and that worked a bit better. It was able to get an address sometimes, but then it was a bit erratic accessing the network.

With ping, I was able to see there was some amount of packet loss. Not too bad for small packets, but up around 8k packet size it was losing about 20%. Not good at all. Suspecting that the cable might not be to spec, I set the laptop to 10mbps instead and that worked just fine. In case it was a bad pair, I inverted from using the orange and green pairs to using blue and brown. (Ethernet cables use 8 conductors, but normally only 4 are used.) That didn’t work any better. But by hooking up only two pairs at a time, at least I was verifying that I was at least wiring the jacks correctly.

The cable I was using on the laptop end was kinda old, so suspecting it next, I swapped that one out. The problem got worse! But this turned out to be the crucial clue into what was going on. Between the upstairs end and the switch, I’d installed a new cable right out of the bag. When I replaced the downstairs cable with the same brand of cable right out of the bag and it got worse, I finally realized that it was those patch cords that were the problem. Though the package said they are Cat 5e rated, the cable itself didn’t have Cat 5e written on it. I suspect someone cheaped out and used out of spec cable and hoped nobody would notice.

Swapped those bum cables out with another set of brand new cables straight from the bag (this time verifying that the cable itself has CAT 5 stamped on the jacket), and things worked beautifully! Still had to rewire the cable again back to the proper color coding and tested again, and now it’s all working great.

Just goes to show that sometimes the thing you expect the least (a brand new cable straight out of the bag) is the one thing that was causing all the problems. Anyways, now we have the phone lines in better shape than ever, plus a network drop to the study downstairs, so I guess it was all worth it.

Saturday was my birthday. Unfortunately I spent most of it cowering in bed and finally going to the emergency room in the middle of the night. This is another one of those stories that needs a ‘put down your sandwich’ warning.

It all started around lunch time with a painful bowel movement involving a bit of blood. Not a good sign, but other than that I seemed fine at that point.

Around 2pm I started feeling a bit tired and run down.

By 3pm I noticed I had a fever. It was 38C at this point. I took a Naproxen and took a rest.

By 4pm I was having bad chills and fever was up to 39C. This was after taking Naproxen which usually works well for fevers. I was drinking lots of water and since I had no nausea, it was staying down, so I wasn’t worried about dehydration.

Somewhere after this I took a second Naproxen. This eventually got things down to 38C or so, and I proceeded to do some sleeping.

I was able to get up and eat a bit of bagel and some more water in the evening and go back to bed still at around 38C. Around 2:30am I woke up again and back up to 39C, and very sore all over. Tried some more Naproxen and my wife gave me an icepack, but it just wasn’t enough, so we headed off to Mackay Hospital’s emergency room.

I was admitted with fever and high pulse rate with suspected dehydration. They took some blood to test, gave me a jab with some fever reducing medicine, and hooked me up to an IV. After just over a liter of saline and a few hours, I was feeling better so they gave me some medicine and sent me home. Been pretty much fine since then, thankfully. Blood test came back normal, so they aren’t exactly sure what it was.

So while I was out getting the couple of odds and ends to complete the new computer case, I also picked up a kit to replace the fan on my video board. I had kludged up a fan on it after the original one died, but it was kinda dorky and didn’t even have a heat sink, just a fan blowing on the chip. Still, it worked ok. Still, might as well get something with a real heat sink, cause it’s only gonna get hotter here over the next month or so.

I get it home and it’s exactly the right size except for one problem… The little plastic knobs to hold the fan on are just *slightly* too small to fit in the holes on the video board. Now, the safe thing to do would have been to whittle down the knobs or replace them with a nut and bolt or something like that. The stupid thing to do is to get out the drill and enlarge the holes just slightly with the next drill bit size up.

Yes, I proceeded to do the stupid thing.

The drilling went very smoothly, and the knobs snapped perfectly into place. I popped the card in the computer and powered it up. Checked that the fan was spinning and it was doing fine. But… nothing came up on the screen. Switched over from the DVI port to the VGA port and finally got some output… except that while half of the screen was fine, random columns of characters were blank, randomized, or shifted to strange colors. Oops.

So back to Guanghua for the 3rd time this week, to pick up a new video card. I’m not much of a gamer, so my needs are modest. I landed on a Elsa FX 534 which is based on the Nvidia GeForce FX5200 chipset. This model uses the 128-bit instead of 64 bit memory, has 128mb video memory, DVI, VGA and TV outputs, and pretty reasonably priced. I’m sure edpark is going to taunt me for getting such a weak-ass card, but it’s fine for my needs, and it’s better than the Nvidia Ti4200 it replaced.

In other news though, got the extra drive cover, and also a black floppy disk drive, so now the whole front panel is nice and uniformly black. Fortunately my old memory card reader was already black, so I didn’t have to replace it. Also I got some IDC10 connectors, male and female, and borrowed some ribbon cable from an obsolete 40-pin IDE cable (current IDE cables are 80-pin for ATA66 and higher). Hooked that up between the front audio connector and the case cable and now the front panel ports work. I didn’t see any Firewire cables with IDC connectors on them, so for now I’ll just use the rear connectors for the few times I use Firewire.

While I was back stateside this time I decommissioned a couple of old servers that were no longer needed. One of them was an old PC and it’s still just barely usable, so I threw the motherboard, video, and network cards in my suitcase and brought it over. I’ve been wanting to play with Asterisk, so I figured I could use it for that. Except I wasn’t about to haul the whole damn case over here. Which means I needed to buy a new one.

When doing computer upgrades, it’s often most effective to upgrade your best computer and then use the hand me downs for the other system you wanted to build. I’d had my eyes on Lian Li (聯力) cases for a while, but I’d been too cheap to pay the extra markup for one. But I’d had to do a lot of work to get proper cooling in my old case, so I figured it was worth it to actual get something decently designed. Looking around, I figured that their PC-61 model was optimal for me:

It’s an all-aluminum case with black exterior, a slideout motherboard tray, 4×5.25″ drives, 3×3.5″ drives accessible and 5×3.5″ drives internal. Has 2 front panel fans that blow over the internal 5 disk hard drive tray, one rear exhaust fan, and one top exhaust fan. It has a lot of nice touches that make it easy to use, like thumbscrews for most things, a slideout hard disk tray, and a pigtail for the front panel switches/leds to make it easy to wire up the pigtail with the motherboard tray out of the case, and then just snap it on to the main cable once you put it together. It also looks really cool.

(I had drooled over the PC-V1000B a bit too, but that’s expensive even by their standards.)

Lian Li cases don’t come with power supplies like many other cases do. Probably a good thing too, because most power supplies included in cases are really really cheap crud. It’s been a while since I looked at power supplies, but looking at locally available brands, the ones from Seasonic seem to get good reviews. I landed on the S12-430 as my choice:

It took a few hours to move everything over, but it’s mostly done now. I need to get another drive cover since it only comes with one, and I have two optical drives, but otherwise it’s pretty much set. Another minor problem is that the front panel audio cable is about 1.5 inches too short to reach the header on my motherboard. I blame my motherboard more than the case though. Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to put the *front* audio connector way at the top back of the motherboard? Duh! It’s a standard IDC10 connector, so I should be able to cobble something up. The other problem is that the front panel Firewire cable is an IDC connector instead of the Firewire 6-pin connector, and my Firewire board only has the latter. Not sure what I’ll do about that yet. But overall, very pleased with the new case. Seems like I’m only getting black computers these days though.

“China’s development must be on the path of democracy and rule of law. If not, China will be a corrupt society.” — Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽)

Sixteen years ago, as groups of students led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, Chinese Communist Party official Zhao Ziyang attempted to negotiate a peaceful solution with the protest leaders. According to recent reports, Zhao realized that moves towards capitalism in the PRC would necessarily require political reforms as well, and that a gradual adoption of democratic systems would avoid the potential problems of sudden political collapse.

Unfortunately, hardliners, reputedly led by Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), decided instead to end the protests through a brutal and deadly crackdown. They then proceeded to purge Mr. Zhao from the CCP, and placed him under house arrest, where he remained in seclusion until his death earlier this year.

One can only wonder how much progress could have been made in China if Mr. Zhao had succeeded in his plan. While capitalism has made great strides in China, the PRC government has changed little since then.

(The above quote was attributed to Mr. Zhao by his friend Zong Fengming (宗鳳鳴) according to press reports. According to these reports, Mr. Zong has written a manuscript on Mr. Zhao’s philosophy, but is being prevented from publishing it.)

I went back and retested most of my last two 50 pack spindles of Ritek 8X DVD+R media using KProbe2. Found a total or 34 unusable or way-out-of-spec disks so far. That’s a ridiculous amount, considering that prior to this I’d have maybe 1 or 2 disks per 100 as bad burns at most with Ritek media. Meanwhile, no problems at all with the various new media I bought for testing (Maxell, Benq, Philips, and Sony). Goodbye, Ritek. Let me know when you’re out of rehab.

While I was gone, I received a package of the March through June issues of Science Fiction & Fantasy magazine to make up for their error in sending my subscription to the wrong country. Now let’s see if the July issue makes it here without problems.

A post from sylphon about exasperating customer service also reminded my of another magazine issue. I subscribe to InStyle magazine for my wife and for some reason didn’t receive a few issues. After figuring out which issues were missing, I went to their website which had a missing issue form. I filled it out and then got an error that it couldn’t be processed.

They said such requests could also be sent by email to customer service, so that was my next try. The site said that by default the subscription would be extended, though you could ask instead to have the issues replaced. So I write to them with my subscription details and the list of issues missed. Then hilarity ensues…

They reply back asking if I would like the issues replaced or the subscription extended. I thought extension was the default, but oh well.

I write back saying to please extend the subscription. I also include the previous email with my subscription details and list of missed issues.

They write back asking for my subscription address.

I write back with the subscription address. I also include the previous emails with the list of missed issues.

They write back asking for the list of missed issues.

Sensing a pattern of not reading the whole fricking email, I send back a message which includes all of the information they’ve requested in as simple a way as possible.

They write back that my subscription has been extended.

End of story? Oh no, that would be much too simple.

A little while later I get another email that my subscription has been extended.

It seems to me that crappy customer support like this ends up costing companies more than it saves. What should have taken one or two requests escalated into several, and then they ended up compensating me twice by mistake. That’s even before counting customer dissatisfaction.

Finally back home!

On my way to SFO airport now…

UPS batteries are usually the lead-acid kind (like car batteries) and need to be replaced every 3-5 years. My UPS recently started complaining that the batteries just weren’t adequate anymore. The batteries were over 7 years old at that point. Looking around the net, I found an excellent small company called Jammin Works which sells very economically priced battery replacement kits for APC UPSes. I was able to get battery kits through them for less than half what a APC branded kit would cost. I got them all installed and they are working out great. (An initial problem I had with them turned out to be due to a loose connection when I installed one of the batteries.) You can often get used UPSes pretty cheap because people don’t want to pay for the branded replacement batteries, so you can often get a good deal on one and replace the batteries yourself for pretty cheap.

Once you’ve done the upgrade, what do you do with the old batteries? It’s ecologically unsound (and in some places illegal) to just dump them in the trash. I tried calling the county hazardous waste department for suggestions, but they only have occasional drop offs for that sort of thing. Finally I found some information that some stores will take old batteries for recycling. One of those was Sears Auto Centers, so I called up a nearby one and they said they’d take them. I drove up there to the battery center and they rolled up a cart and took them off of me for no charge. Nice.