A few minutes until I wake Lee up...

Well, the young man who was supposed to be at the party last night didn't show up, so Lee ended up with this vague feeling of having been stood up. Vague, because there was no meeting of the minds between her and the young man (an old school chum from when we lived here, pre-1996), but she still felt a little bad.

The party was an enjoyable get-together. One gentleman there, a fellow named Charlie, showed me the path. He's 75 years old and quite a dancer! (I also happened to notice he got to dance with all the pretty ladies!) Among those pretty ladies was Galina, whom he took under his arm at one point in the evening's festivities and taught/danced the East Coast Swing, while I aped his footwork off to the side.

As I said, a fun evening.

* * *The reaction to my statement regarding the local computer "expert's" having placed spyware on a client's machine made me rethink what I said, to make sure I had not jumped to an possibly unwarranted conclusion. After consulting with Natalie, who worked with the machine, I conclude that I did so jump, and hereby clarity:

After the expert had worked with the machine, it was determined (by Lee) that a backdoor program existed on the machine. The client does not recall being informed of the installation of any program by the expert (though at least one - a modified Outlook Express - was so installed). It is possible the backdoor was there before the expert laid hands on the machine.

In which case, one might say the "charge" against the expert may amount only to being ignorant of the purpose of the program (which my daughter, who does not bill herself as an "expert," found).

On the other hand, it could very well be that my initial conclusion was correct.

I shall pursue this, quietly.

Which reminds me... I need to get Natalie up so we can go to the ham breakfast.

Cheers...

Techno-nerds!

There are two of us, having fun making a crossover cable...

Using RJ45 connectors:
1 Tx+ -------------- Rx+ 3
2 Tx- -------------- Rx- 6
3 Rx+ -------------- Tx+ 1
6 Rx- -------------- Tx- 2
Everything else goes straight through.

Cheers...

Hectic day...

Lee and I went to the ham breakfast this morning and had a pretty good time. We then went to the store and opened, and decided to call home and give Galina the day off.

Drew was sick half the night, so we wrote him off for the day.

It was a pretty hectic day, as we accumulated a small mountain of UPS packages to process. The line of customers waiting to be served did not seem to get any shorter as the day went on.

During my time in the store on Thursday, I'd swapped the defective monitor in front, on Alice, with the one I used with Borg. Big mistake. The defect was not fixed by a good blow-out with canned air, and thus, between the customer flow and the lousy monitor, I could not do the report today.

Then a tourist stopped by, with a couple of Compaq laptops, and asked us to solve a problem for him. (Hence the previous post on a crossover network cable.) In the final analysis, I don't know whether we solved the customer's problem (the answer hinges on just how badly he wants to connect to the Internet via AOL). We did fix his flaky cable problem, though.

One valuable lesson came out of the cable-making exercise: trust your hardware. Lee and I found a site that showed us a crossover cable with pins 7 and 8 swapped, which was not indicated in the flaky cable we got from the client (there, 7 and 8 went straight through). A later reference to another site supported the straight-through position. Ah, well... at least we both got a lot of experience making up cables.

Time to go to bed. The client will be by early tomorrow to pick up his gear.

Cheers...