Jack Off

[howeird]

When AT&T hooked up dial tone the other day, I took the wired phone I'd been using for testing in the kitchen up to the bedroom, and heard no dial tone at that jack. The kitchen jack has dual plugs, so I tried the expedient of plugging the one into the other, but that didn't help. So this morning I pulled off both faceplates and checked the color coding on Tip and Ring on the working jack against the bedroom jack. Someone who did not know inside wiring had messed with the bedroom jack in a way to may it non-functional, not matter what wires were connected - it looked like an abortive attempt to take secondary tip & ring out to a second phone via a piece of 4-wire cable, except instead of it being hooked up to secondary T&R it was hooked up to secondary R and primary T. Apartment wiring is not that simple - tip isn't solid green and ring isn't solid red, and secondaries are not solid yellow and black. There's a color code where a primary color is banded with a secondary color. in my case, the live Tip is white with a light green band, and Ring is dark green with a white (or maybe it's silver) band. Long story short, I stripped and screwed in the right wires and now I have dial tone in the bedroom, which means I can take the cordless out of the bedroom and put it in the livingroom where God intended it to be.

In other news Western Digital just shipped my replacement drive, exactly a month after I shipped them the bad one. This is not my idea of good customer service, considering for most people this would mean a completely down PC.

Ordered frames for the 20x30 posters Qoop is making me. Frames cost about 2/3 what the prints cost. And these are the cheapest frames. Ouch.

Off to work.