filePro and "crossgrading"

[Fairlight]

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 07:45:08PM -0400, Jay Ashworth may or may not have
proven themselves an utter git by pronouncing:
> 
> "I'd like an argument, please."

*laugh*  *laughs harder*  Good one!

> > Sometimes being the one catalysing change can be bothe beneficial and
> > gratifying.  Other times, it's a sheer PITA with -zero- reward and nothing
> > but frustration.  I prefer to focus on the positive times though, or
> > I'd go quite mad.  :).
> 
> And the difference between that and this would... be?

I'm not quite sure some days.  Sometimes I think it's only the ability to
still question my own sanity.  At least I still do.  It's the people that
are utterly sure that you have to really worry about.  :)

> Your problem, by the way, is a high-resistance cross out in the plant
> somewhere, likely from moisture incursion in a cable they forgot to
> change the nitrogen bottle on.  When you take more phones off hook, you
> draw more current, which heats up the moisture and dries it out
> temporarily.
> 
> The hum comes from the fact that phone pairs are balanced quite
> delicately to ground: you half-ground one side and all sort of ugliness
> happens.

Well, when the support person on the phone just reiterated to me that it
sounds to her like a deep ground and/or a cross, I kind of correlated that
to what Bill said yesterday, and what you said.

They claim they're still having problems recovering from the storms--from
two weeks ago!!  Now LG&E had 150K people without power and fixed all of
them inside 5 days.  There's no excuse.

Well, they called me today at 3pm to tell me someone would be working on
it.  Repair man called and left cell voicemail at 4:20pm saying he -was-
working on it and hoped to have it fixed soon.  The line was dead entirely
at 5:30pm.  I got back to doing stuff here about 7:30pm and the line--and
the fraggin' hum are back.  The only improvement so far is that I don't
have to use two devices to generate a dial tone.  That's it.  The hum is
actually a little louder, come to think of it.

I called them up, and I was told it's -not- a closed ticket, and they're
scheduled to go out and work on it first thing in the morning and it's
supposed to be fixed by 10am.  I told her, "Funny, that's -exactly- what I
was told yesterday."

The only GOOD thing is that my DSL...I dunno what they -have- done, but my
DSL speeds when I got it installed were 109 to 124.9KB/second down.  When
it got hot in spring, early April 85F+, my lines took a dive, and I dropped
first to 90, then to 75, then to 67KB/sec down.  It eventually stabilised
after a week and started climbing back up.  For several weeks now it's been
hovering at about 97KB/sec.  I just tested it and it's higher than I've
-ever- seen it since installation:  127.10 KB/s  And that's with the voice
line buzzing like a kicked beehive.

If they fix the voice segment, there's (I suppose) a chance it could even
improve more.  Certainly they affected -something- for me to see that vast
a sudden improvement.  I -certainly- won't complain about 127, but I still
envy Bob's 153.  Ah, bandwidth envy. :) As with disk space, CPU speeds, and
video framerates, no matter how much you have, it's never enough. *chuckle*

You know, I just reformatted the last paragraph with par, and the one thing
that annoys me is that it nukes the proper English convention of two spaces
after a period--if the thing that follows the period is not alphanumeric.
Asterisks, colons, etc., all trigger a condensation to one space.  I find
that annoying.  Any quick solution to that, by chance?

mark->
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