09:15 – I misspoke yesterday. Barbara’s parents are actually moving into their actual apartment today, rather than the guest apartment. She left a few minutes ago for her parents’ house to start hauling some of their boxed up stuff over to the new apartment. The movers are coming later today to move the furniture and other large items. I’ll probably head over there tomorrow morning after everything is in place and they’re settled in to get the TV, stereo, and other electronics connected and working.
We started yesterday on a new batch of 30 biology kits, printing labels and labeling bottles and envelopes. Labeling, filling, and sealing containers is the bulk of the work. After that, it’s just final assembly of all the subassemblies.
Our phone service cutover happened sometime yesterday. The PhonePower adapter showed up in the mail mid-afternoon, just in time. It comes with a little folded pamphlet with installation instructions. I was delighted to see that their recommended setup put the terminal adapter between the cable modem and our router, figuring that would solve all of the problems I had with PhonePower last time. Alas, that was not to be. I connected the TA between the cable modem and router, only to find that the router couldn’t get to the Internet. Oh, well.
So I connected things using their alternative procedure, which puts the router between the modem and the TA. I also made sure to configure the router to put the IP address of the TA in the DMZ, which in theory is the same as a virtual direct connection to the cable modem. At first, everything appeared to work properly. I had dialtone and was able to dial. But all I could get when I dialed was a re-order tone (fast busy).
By that time it was late evening, so I just left things as they were and went to bed, hoping that everything would clear up overnight. That was not to be. This morning, I still had dialtone, but nothing else. So I power reset the TA, hoping that would allow it to reinitialize properly. That didn’t work, so I guess I’ll try resetting the whole network again to see if I can get service.
15:04 – I just got back from helping Barbara’s parents move to their new digs. Their TV and component audio system is now set up and working, along with two corded phones, an answering machine, and a cordless phone. The place is very nice. The dining room and other common areas are similar to those in a decent hotel. Their apartment is also nice, with a large living area, small kitchenette, two good-size bedrooms, and two full baths. The staff is friendly and helpful, and there are activities galore. I suspect Barbara’s parents are going to be a lot happier there than they were in their house. They’ll certainly be much less isolated. There are lots of elderly people around, and all of them seem friendly. The facility has a bus that makes regularly-scheduled runs to the supermarket, drugstore, Target/Wal*Mart, doctors’ offices, and so on. There’s maid service, and the dining room serves three full meals a day, with the main meal at noon. Barbara, Frances, and I had dinner there, and the food is quite good.
I left around 13:45 to come home. Colin is not used to having us both gone, but he was a good dog while I was gone. I arrived home just in time to walk him before a severe thunderstorm rolled in. That was fortunate, because unlike any of our other young BCs, Colin is afraid of thunder. All of the others have ignored thunderstorms, even quite loud ones, until they got to be eight or nine years old, when they suddenly decided that thunder was terrifying. Colin has been afraid of it since he was a pup.
I still haven’t gotten the PhonePower VoIP service working yet, and I’m about ready to give up on it for today.
15:59 – Our PhonePower VoIP service is now working properly. Fortunately, I decided to try just one more thing. The firmware in our D-Link DIR-615 router was about five years old. I visited the D-Link page and downloaded the most recent firmware, which is only about 4.5 years old. I held my breath, afraid I’d brick the router, and installed the firmware upgrade. That gave me what I needed: the ability to disable SIP in the Application Level Gateway. I disabled SIP, rebooted the router, and everything now works properly.
What a relief. It would have been embarrassing to have to call PhonePower tech support. When I created my account with them, one of the questions had a drop-down list where you could quantify how much you understood about this stuff. There were five choices. The first choice was basically for people who are completely ignorant. I first chose the final choice, which was basically “I know more about this stuff than you guys do.” I then reconsidered. That sounded a bit arrogant, although I have written books for O’Reilly about networking and TCP/IP and I did used to have primary technical responsibility for a digital phone network with 70 switches and several thousand stations. So I changed my selection to the fourth choice, which simply indicated that I knew quite a lot about this stuff. But having chosen even #4, it would have been mortifying for me to have to call tech support for help.
Now if only I could figure out how to delete voicemails on my cell phone. I need a teenager to help me, I guess. I’ve also been thinking about sending my first ever SMS.
16:08 – We really are living in a rain forest. That thunderstorm that just blew through here dumped another 3.2 inches (8.1 cm) of rain on us, and it’s still raining. That’s close to half a meter of rain in the last five weeks, or about 10 cm per week.
You’ve probably done this, but unplug everything and bring up modem, TA and router in that sequence. You should also be able to access the TA and check it’s settings. Maybe it isn’t getting automatic IP/DNS settings and you’ll have to put them in manually. I can also access my ooma box to forward ports, etc.
Must be bad juju. Mine worked right out of the box with no problems. Every so often if the cable connection is really being hammered I get garbled talk, but it’s rare.
There was a command line macro in the original distribution of Unix named “1”. If you typed it, it printed out”
One Bell System. It works.
Much truth in that.
Usually if you push “7” while listening to the message, it deletes. “9” saves them. At least that’s how it’s been for my past three phones, none of which are from the same manufacturer, and which used three different OSes.
Texting is a great tool if you use it properly. Too many people think it’s a method of communicating in real time, like a phone is, but it’s really like sending an electronic Post-it note. I never send a text (or email) if I need an immediate answer.
On my LG cell phone via Verizon Wireless “7” deletes them and “9” saves them. “4” usually lists options and “0” replays a vm. I never text anything and only use the thing for calls, period. I will not be surfing the web, watching movies and texting on a cell phone anytime soon. Or on a tablet for that matter. Phones are phones and pooters are pooters.
Gorgeous weather here today after our monsoon hit yesterday and last night; we had rain blowing across the fields in rolling sheets, after I witnessed fog rolling in fast over the hills toward us. Then some thunder and lightning, not much here, but severe to our north, with tornado warnings, and I guess a white tornado touched down on the beach in Queens yesterday; somebody got some nice shots of it online.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tornado+in+queens+2012&hl=en&prmd=imvnsu&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=WeJMUPiKO8bv0gG4o4DIDg&ved=0CEkQsAQ&biw=1920&bih=885
Checked on our new house 65 miles northwest just now and found branches and twigs blown all over and folks around us busy with their chainsaws.
It has been calm and cool here—only 70F today, even if it was at 80% humidity.
Not sure what the story is today, but while we were in Berlin, texting was by far the cheapest way to communicate. Everyone texted and few people made calls, because the calls cost 60¢/min, whereas a text message was only 10¢/msg FOR the sender. Cell phone calls are paid entirely by the sender in Europe—or at least that was still the case when I left. When somebody was on the phone, it was usually someone under 20, and we used to comment to each other that that person was not paying for the phone call.
Every time we visited the US, it was always a kind of mental surprise that people everywhere here were on their phones all the time, and did not even know how to text, because phone calls were comparatively cheap next to calls in Germany.
“Now if only I could figure out how to delete voicemails on my cell phone.”
Geez, even I can do that.
Yeah, but it’s “L” and “6” that deletes and saves, isn’t it? 😀