The Lair of the SlowFox

Well, couldn't bring up the interwebs at Castle Fox this morning, again, after possibly a clear seven or eight days' run with consistent connections. Instead just the red glowing light on the router indicating that attempting to load up some new podcasts to the Shuffle was going to have to wait until later.

So I'm listening to Larry Niven's Ringworld instead; I remember reading this waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the 80s, but don't actually remember that much of the story, so it's nice to get the refresher.

Also, I forgot my wallet today; result is I feel kinda naked.

"Once you have elimated the impossible," quoth Holmes, "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth!"

It sounds so simple when he says it. But when faced with my intermittent web drop-outs at Castle Fox, I'm not really sure how to apply it.

First off, I ripped out all of my internal extension wires for the phone, so that the only socket in the house is the KC provided one, over which I have no control. The reasoning behind this was that mebbe some of my wiring had come loose, and was causing interference. Result? No difference.

Next, I swapped the router (I have a spare). Again, no change; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. When it's working, I can swap back to the original router, and it'll also work. When it's not working, I can swap routers, and remain subfunctional. So tentatively I draw the conclusion that it's not the router.

I then phoned KC themselves, who assured me that they test all the lines in the exchange on a 24 hour basis, and confirmed that my phone line had no faults. Huh.

Belatedly, I realised that I'd not swapped the ADSL microfilter throughout all the above, and perhaps that was intermittently faulty? Consequently, I swapped in a new microfilter on Friday, and everything was fine until this morning... whence, again, I have no web - PC or XBox.

So. Either both routers are intermittently faulty. Or both microfilters are intermittently faulty. Or both the PC and the two XBoxes are intermittently faulty (network only). Or there's an intermittent line problem that's evading KC's detection.

None of these seem terribly likely, to be honest.

Blech.

Back at work, after what turned out to be a pretty mild case of 'flu, if my previous experience is anything to go by. Mostly better now, although I have some freshly brewed lemsip on the desk to try and keep me functional for the rest of the day.

Anyway, thanks to all for the good wishes and stuff - Castle Fox was offline for the duration, which means that this is the first chance I've had to check back in on Dreamwidth. The ISP thing is something I'll have to sort out eventually, but I wasn't really feeling up to it (or anything, really) just then.

Right now I'm slightly perturbed by the fact that Outlook is projecting that it's going to take 13 minutes to update my Inbox with the emails from Thursday. That doesn't bode well.

's been a quiet Saturday, all told; I took advantage of being dog-less to have a lie-in, until 7.15am.

It was pouring when I went to fetch the hound, but has since eased off a bit. Nonetheless, given the recently thawed snow will have saturated the ground, it's no surprise that the roads were starting to do the Venetian impression...

I was actually wondering if I was going to be able to get online today at all - the router dropped the net connection this afternoon, and I've been flicking it on every hour or so since to see if the situation had corrected itself. Assuming that this post does, y'know, post, then that should be evidence that a resolution of sorts was found, but it's a bit disappointing to lose access across the weekend - especially when KC have an effective monopoly as the ISP for this fair city.

Standing in a gradually rising puddle whilst having this morning's shower convinced me that the drain needed clearing out in the yard. This is not a fun job, and despite my best efforts at trying to separate grungy water from fox, there was some cross-contamination, which I was less than thrilled about.

The problem is that the drain itself has a plastic 6"x6" cover that sits in a recessed square in the concrete... unless a curious hound sees it. For some reason, Mali takes an active dislike to the plastic inserts being in the drainage channels, so he flips them up with his paw, and then carries them across the yard to put them down. He doesn't chew them(!), he just feels that the yard is more aesthetically pleasing sans drainage grates.

What then happens is that rubbish and the like that blows into the yard flutters down the opened gulleys, resulting in me pulling out plastic bags and chocolate bar wrappers that have been blocking the channel.

Flow is somewhat improved, but I'm going to have to come up with a more long term solution - ideally, I'd like to find some metal grids, in the hope that they'd be sufficiently heavy to resist canine interference. Otherwise, I might try and screw down some wire mesh across the top, to make them fully tamper-proof.

It has bugged me for a while that I've had the fridge at Castle Fox positioned in almost the worst place possible, from an energy efficiency point of view: vis, next to the radiator and immediately beneath the boiler.

So I've shifted it to the other end of the kitchen. However, this meant that the door now opened the wrong way - from being a right-hinged door that ensured that the fridge was accessible from within the kitchen as it were, shifting it to the other end meant that the door opened to create a barrier, and you had to practically exit the kitchen (at the opposite end) to be able to reach the milk.

Now, when I bought said domestic appliance, I remember flicking through the instructions (admit it, we all read the instruction manuals for white goods when they arrive) those 9 years past and seeing a subsection headed 'reversing the door hinge' or some such. Despite all the resources available to me courtesy of the highly structured filing environment that is Castle Fox's archives, I was unable to locate the fridge's Book of Words to seek further guidance, but in the end the rough hint proved enough.

First off, you need to lay the beast (carefully) on its back, remove the front feet, unscrew the lower bolt holding the door on and slide the whole door assembly downwards, so it disengages the upper pin.

It then lifts off, and you can extricate the upper bolt from the door casing and transfer it to the opposite (top left) corner of the body. Likewise, the lower hinge bolt and its dummy partner can dosey-do and swap positions, whereupon everything gets reassembled in reverse order (you just swear in different places).

All this would be so much easier if I actually possessed a non-stripped posidrive screwdriver, or a 6mm spanner. Lacking both, I had to use the needlenose pliers from my Leatherman, and also its cross-head driver. But believe me, trying to torque up fixings with that device was not easy on the hands. Ouch.

Anyway, with luck, the upshot of this transformation will be that the fridge will no longer be fighting a cooling battle against the wall of heat roiling off the kitchen radiator, and instead will be able to chug merrily along, sipping far less elctrickery than in the past. Will I notice the difference? Probably not, but at least that's one less thing to keep me awake at night.