Hectic day...
Jul. 5th, 2002 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpLee 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...
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...
