Andy's Blog

I was in Seattle when Hurricane Isabel landed. My trip was delayed a bit as I was supposed to head to SHD (Shenandoah Valley Airport) or IAD (Dulles in DC) and they were closing airports left and right. Anyhow, I made it out the next day and got home without incident. Actually, it was pretty impressive that nothing at all really happened to anyone in my family. The winds apparently were pretty wicked, and it was reported on NPR that a county close by my house got 24" of rain (that's right 2 FEET of rain!). Yet, the worst effect was that my in-laws house had about an 1.5 inches of leaves and branches in the yard that I had to help my father-in-law clear up.

While I was in Seattle, I went to a show at Graceland with Ben Compton a cool friend from work who has taken me on as his young Paduan indie rock learner. We saw Denali a band from Richmond, VA and Rainer Maria. It was excellent. I recommend you catch one of their shows if at possible.

Why is it so hard to get a home network right?

We've been remodelling our basement, the intended home of my office and hence network hub, gateway/firewall, webserver etc. I had to move the equipment three times. Nothing ever works easily. First, wireless networks are upredictable, and hard to debug (at least I don't know of the right tools). Second, wired networks are surprisingly easy to get wrong when you're making your own cables. There are only 64 possible combonations of the 8 wires in one cable, and even with a cable tester and a color chart for wiring, I think I botch 50% of my cables. Now, I'm trying to fix a problem where I had a cable that used to work, that it turns out was miswired, and once fixed, now the wall doesn't work when it used to. Ugh. Time to crack open the wall, and rewire something yet again.

Why is this so hard?