Went to a very nice gathering last night at the house of the big-cheese in Jen’s new program. This guy is both her grandboss and the great-grandboss, and he’s hosting a series of dinners to help the new fellows, residents, and staff to get to know each other. What an amazing concept: team building, not through bullshit ropes courses and external consultants, but by bringing people over to your house and being available to talk to them. It’s almost as if this guy thought “I want these people to be independent, useful human beings. What if I treat them that way from the beginning and hope for the best?”
In other news, DSL is not my friend. Turns out that there is one (1) phone jack in my house which provides consistent, high quality signal. The others don’t have the dignity to simply *never* connect, it’s just that they drop carrier when the refrigerator goes on (or similar crap like picking up the phone starting laundry, feeding the cats, etc). I hit it by a lucky guess that the jack physically closest to the primary drop to the house might have the shortest / least mangled connection to whatever magic DSL plant is out there in the big world.
Is there a good reference out there on how this technology works? I’m curious to know how it can be so flakey in such unexpected ways.
Mowed the lawn. Buggers at Home Depot sold me a “refurbished” mower for cheap, but they forgot to put one of the parts on it. The part in question is the cutoff switch connector, the little hand grip thing that, when you let it go, stops the whirling blades of death. There’s the bicycle-brake style cable down to the kill switch on the motor, but it just terminates (looking sort of sad) up towards the top of the handle.
Home Depot’s perfectly reasonable attitude was “the sign said ‘as is’, SUCKER. Pay full price if you want all the parts!” They don’t carry parts. The web carries parts, and I’ll order from there. For today though, I clamped the cable end in the vice grips, yanked on it and wrapped it around the handlebar, and happily mowed my lawn. Stupid kill switch…who needs it, anyway?
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