One of those days. And then some.

[captainsblog]

As I seem to keep writing, it's never simple around here, even when it should be.

Now THIS would be simple.


(thanks to roguepuppet and whoever I'm hotlinking to for that).


Instead, yesterday's mission only should have been simple: get signatures and payment on Emergency Filing Numero Uno, and find/purchase simple part to allow new DVD recorder (the subject of yesterday's rant) to receive and record TV signal.

Mission Accomplished by about 1 p.m. Go me. Now all that remained was to transmit the Emergency Filing across the internet, and plug in simple part to make TV work properly.  A five-minute job on the worst of average days.

Except, as we used to say on 2047, enter Lieutenant Machina to gum the whole thing up, for the tasks didn't get finished for closer to five hours.

----

Work before play, so I opened my software (I'd already conformed the files to the final-signed version) and hit the humorously-named "one-touch filing button," clicking all the acknowledgements about how everything now proceeds automatically and to NOT TOUCH ANYTHING.

That under way, I inserted PAL-style plug A into RF-style cable end B, plugged it into the television, and.... nothing. Faint traces of two local channels and the slightest hint of TNT, of all things, but no more.

Back down the hall. "One touch filing" has made a big plate of bankruptcy hash. Screens all over the place about how this field is missing and how I'm locked out of entering the "bankruptcy" field (even though I can see it on the screen). I aborted out. We can still do this the old, stone-knives-and-bearskins way by manually uploading the files, I said.

Two hours later, I still had the district's version of the Blue Screen of Death. It was sending the file, but at a slow speed not seen since AOL version 1.9. I bailed out and entered "query" mode to make sure the file hadn't been sent sufficiently to generate an "event." It hadn't, but even this simple inquiry task was taking painfully forever. It then occurred to me: maybe there's an infinite number of monkeys on the server right now trying to upload Shakespeare's Chapter 11.



So I put that task to the side, and resumed my fight with the cable. Troubleshooting time: Is the problem with the set, the setup, or the signal from that particular cabling (the same one from my Tarzan episode of a few weeks back). I rolled the whole thing back down the hall to this office, where there's still a working wire, plug it in, and.... nothing. Now things seemed really weird, so I tried getting DVD customer service on the phone.

There...are....17...customers....ahead of you.

No problem, I thought, I can see if the other Technical Hell is any better. One query later, I realized, it wasn't.  Tech Guy picked up the line mere seconds after I'd given up on him and started rolling the assembly BACK to the living room.  It had worked out there 24 hours ago, so there must be signal in that line, right?

[Scene missing, and I do mean scene. Recalling DVD support, this time getting Tech Gal after once again being 17th in queue, she finally coming on line the second Eleanor arrived home and thus causing two dogs to re-enact the Wilhelm Scream, me and the kid getting into nearly a hair-pulling fight over how to control the dogs while I'm doing this work, finally putting myself into timeout and beginning a new digging-in-the-dirt project for Eleanor at the corner of one of her beds. When things get stressful here, I always return to my roots.]



After all that, close to 6 p.m., we finished outside, all kissed and made up, and I tried the upload again. Whoosh! It went through like a greased pig!

Meanwhile, I asked Eleanor to check the connection she'd made with the original bare-wire cable a few days ago. Amazingly, in the course of all my fumbling I'd broken a cable extension cord, but did it in a way which exposed its bare wire and provided a textbook example of how to strip and crimp the bare one coming out of the wall. Somewhat differently than the way she'd originally done it, it turns out.

Five minutes later (remember five minutes? like what this was all supposed to be about ten paragraphs ago?), the connections were all in and actual channels, from Kidstuff to Kolbert, were coming through the DVD player.

I then went off to weird dreams about the dam backing up and all the cellars and roads in town flooding.  And there's rain in the forecast today. Dam.

Comments

[luckycee.livejournal.com]

LOVE the key thingie!