Ewok Hut

For those of you that still don’t know (which is doubtful, since I’ve been told by more than one person I’ve been “blathering” about it), I was on vacation in the Outer Banks for the past week or so. The Outer Banks is a long, but narrow, island about a mile or two off the coast of North Carolina. For any Europeans, North Carolina is just below the halfway point on the US East Coast.

We stayed in Corolla, the really small circle, but our general traveling was done throughout all of the big circle. From Outer-Banks.com

We left on Sunday, November 5th from Pennsylvania. It took us about 6 hours to reach the island. The weather was pretty good when we arrived, though a bit hotter than we would have liked. My grandparents also joined us separately in, like, 10 minutes. We stayed in Pine Island, which normally we wouldn’t be able to afford, but fortunately my dad does some work for the owner of the house.

Since we also brought my Golden Retriever, the first thing we did was go to the beach.

The beaches of the Outer Banks are different than most; they’re not very commercialized. No boardwalk, and not as many people. Since we were down in the off-season, that explains why no one else was really there.

This wasn’t the first time we were there. In fact, this is the third time we were in that house. I don’t have any pictures of it, sorry, but it was second-row from the beach. Instead of many hotels, it is designed like a residential area down there. People (rich people) buy houses there, then rent them out throughout the year. The one we were at had a home movie theater with stadium seating, a tiki bar, and all kinds of crap.

This is the only picture I have of the house. This is my dog…yawning…

I’m not going to break it down day-by-day, because that would be boring and befitting a school essay. I’ll just give you one more significant event before I just fill the rest up with pictures.

We like to play tennis. Particularly, I do. I used to play all the time, and it’s the only sport I voluntarily will play (I won’t watch it, though…blech). We went every day, usually riding bikes to the court 3 miles away. One day, we just drove and took the dog with. He was pretty hot, and there was no wind blowing. However, he must have thought the green court was grass…

We were playing a game when Woo just suddenly squated over. My dad wasn’t quick enough to get a picture of the act in process, but this will do.

Our diet mainly consisted of clam chowder, various kinds of fish, pizza and tacos. I usually spent most of the day, ironically, on the computer. I decided to install Knights of the Old Republic, which I had never played. I liked it very much and I played it when I wasn’t able to access the internet. The home’s router was a bit unstable and the connection wasn’t the greatest either.

So, all in all, it was a fun vacation. The only problem was having to do school every day, as I’m homeschooled. I just got back yesterday, so I’m readjusting myself now. I ran out of stuff to say, so here’s a bunch of pictures.

In addition to the ocean, the “sound” (the area between the island and the mainland) is also quite beautiful. This is a picture of it from the house.

Here’s a picture of my mom (I think that’s her) and Woo on the walkway that leads to the beach.

I promised you pictures of me, but there were no good ones, so here’s one I just took at home. Enjoy.

For those unaware, I’ve been on vacation (”holiday” for Europeans) for the past week. Fortunately, I have internet access so I’ll give a little summary about what I’m doing.

I’m in the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Pretty cold (and raining) at the moment, but we didn’t go down here to see the beach. We’ve so far been to several restaurants, like Awful Arthur’s, Crossbones Sunset Bar & Grille and many others. I just realized there isn’t really much to say, so I’ll give a more complete update when I get back, including pictures.

On another note, the voters of America are idiots. Really big idiots…

I have determined that summer (by that I mean anything not winter) is the worst season ever and should be eliminated from the pantheon of the year. Living in moderately temperate Pennsylvania, which experiences extremes of heat and cold, I cannot imagine how someone in Florida or something can cope with the horror that is summer year-round.

1. Heat. First and foremost, summer is just too damn hot. I’m the type of person that finds it comfortable at 5% humidity at 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Pennsylvania’s average summer temperature at 2452435247852408325742597245o F at 5000% humidity makes for an unhappy, dehydrated Ewok.
2. Humidity. The only thing worse than heat is that godawful saturation of moisture. I don’t mind humidity unless it’s extremely hot (for example I would enjoy living in a produce refer unit). However, this is summer and that means humidity + heat. Bad combination.
3. Thunderstorms. The natural end to humidity is the thunderstorm, that scourge terrorizing the land as if nature wants to give the modern world a jolly “screw you.”
• Electromagnetism. Thunderstorms cause EM interference which wrecks havoc on the phone and cable lines. So, it slows down the internet.
• Turning off electronic devices. Of course you need to do this to prevent your precious equipment from having a higher chance of being fried by a few thousand volts. This can disrupt someone’s whole night.
4. Power outages and brownouts. After a thunderstorm hits it can leave significant infrastructure damage in its wake. This can leave rural residents out of power for days and also leave sub- and urbanites out of power for a period of time. Of course, you also have the majority of American households running air conditioning units which can also drain the powergrid during significant heat spells in godforsaken states such as California.
5. Tornados. Surely the most threatening thing about summer is the tornado. In flat areas warnings and watches occur often in some areas, forcing you to retreat into the basement. The effects of this are similar to deactivating electronic devices during a thunderstorm.
6. Rain. Normally I don’t mind rain. However, in summer, there are only two options - drought and flood. No, there can never be a middle-ground. You’re either being forced off of the highways by rising flash floods or you’re rationing your water due to the arid climate. Even when it rains, it rains hard, and rarely are the effects of such to replenish the water reservoirs, because the fricking water just runs off the land into the oceans.
7. Insects. Centipedes, milipedes, Japanese beetles, stinkbugs, bees, mosquitos and other pests run rampant dominion in summer. These evil creatures come forth from their edifices and hives to wreck terror in your lives. In winter, these hellish beasts either die or go into hibernation.
8. Light. In summer there is an abundance of light. In winter, night sets early. This is why summer sucks. Who hasn’t intended to sleep in ’til 12 PM just to get woken up by the vile rays of ol’ Helios? Sure, you could just close your blinds, but the light still persists! Also, light reflects off of your computer screens, giving you headaches and causing you to resort to drastic measures to prevent the demonic photons from damaging your corneas.
9. Summer vacation. Yes, you heard me right. I despise summer vacation. What bigger interruption of daily life is there than this? Perhaps I’m jaded, seeing as my past summer was spent making up schoolwork due to my being sick for most of May, but it throws you off the status quo, making it harder to re-enter school in three months because you forget the majority of stuff you learned last year.
10. Repetition. Perhaps the worst part of summer is that it will come again in a year. Oh, God, no.

So, with winter near upon us, I say “good riddance” to the abomination of summer.

In the countless many (4) DSL installations I’ve done, it’s always been apparent that there are two proved points about networking: 1) It never goes smoothly unless you’re doing it at home. 2) it makes me want to not be in the field of computers and instead go to baking or something. I’m not complaining about the concept of networking, because it’s one of the greatest ideas out there. The problem is when you get into a home that has an archaic computer or bad wiring. Unfortunately, this job was both.

Networking isn’t my speciality, so I suppose I’ve been lucky on the software end of things. I can do some of the basic non-DHCP stuff, but only between computers and computers or computers and routers. This installation was pretty simple - computer to access point. When I first got there, the computer was probably nine years old. The person using it was surprisingly adept at Windows, so that made things go a lot smoother.

The first problem was with the modem/computer connection. I knew USB on Win98 computers was horrible at best, and it’s understandable why Verizon could have done this, but I think it was cheap anyway - the USB installation in Verizon’s software is disabled for 98 and marked as “unsupported.” The computer didn’t have a network interface card (NIC). This is problem 1.

Following that, I called Verizon’s technical help. I got some lady in Virginia (I’m assuming it’s Virginia from the way she spoke) who had problems hearing us over the speakerphone (remember that). After she had gone down the checklist of things I did, she said that Verizon, in the past, got a bunch of computer inept idiots and those annoying kids that call up thinking they know everything (I’m just the opposite because I do know everything) reporting all kinds of technical problems with Windows 98 and Verizon’s service. Instead of fixing that, they just discontinued support because it was obviously costing them man-hours of free phone support.

That was the first problem.

So, she said that from her support center, they could try to enable USB installation ONCE to see if it work. When she tried to do that, she couldn’t reach the modem. She detected that the line had extreme static. One of the first things I noticed was fluorescent lighting, but I turned that off and it made no difference. I put the modem on other jacks - no difference. I eventually gave up and placed it to just random electromagnetic interference in the house, and she agreed.

That was the second problem.

Awhile later, after the lady who was trying to put the DSL in attempted to cancel the service (I’m not sure why she did), they offered to give her a PCI NIC adapter, which was exactly what she needed. From the get-go I knew this wouldn’t fix her problem (newer modems store their connection details on-site while older ones require a computer to dial in), but it would fix half of it. Today I went over and installed that. Went perfectly, but we still couldn’t figure out why the modem was unable to connect to the server. One of the things that occured to me was something I ran into at my grandfather’s - a dry-loop connection or something. Since his telephone infrastructure was older, something special was required to enable DSL to work. However, this residence was in a new development, so I ruled that out because our house was older and we were able to install DSL right on the phone line.

Later today, I came with my dad (who does wiring, so I figured he could run a dedicated phone line out to the outdoor telephone service box) to fix this problem once and for all. I thought of everything I needed beforehand - Laptop, another identical modem (stolen from my grandfather’s), extension cord. My goal was to at least narrow down the problem; I didn’t know if it was inside the house, or outside the house - the former would cost AT LEAST $90 to just get a technician out there while the latter is the company’s problem. I plugged the modem directly into the telephone access point outside the house and it worked immediately. I was even able to proceed to the account creation screen on the laptop. So, it was inside the house. Just a sidenote; it was a tad odd to be sitting on the ground with a laptop at 8 PM while having a tiny modem attached to an extension cord.

I realize I’m beginning to drag on, so I’ll get more to the point. We knew the problem was now inside the house, so we first wanted to make sure all the connections were fine with the phone jacks themselves. The area we were working in had closed walls, so there was no way we could easily look. My dad wanted to find a terminal so that we could run a new wire. We couldn’t find one in the walls, but we did find something peculiar - in another room, there was a hugeass splitter coming out from a phone jack. The wires in it were leading into other rooms. This was the terminal. We tried the wire to the computer directly in the jack - nothing. We tried another wire, then the modem worked perfectly.

We had narrowed it down again, but this time to just one strand of wire. We were about to give up when my dad noticed something. As soon as he held the plug up, I realized the problem before he even mentioned it, but I have to admit I wouldn’t have caught it if he hadn’t brought attention to it. The wires in the jack were switched. That was the cause of the “static” and it was purely responsible for making the line impure.

So, the night ended well - computer-modem was working and modem-ISP was working. Yay. The practical lesson of this post is to think outside the box. If something should logically work, check the most subtle thing you can. Only you can prevent forest fires. Stuff like that.