Scratch Paper

This morning we are finally getting all we are paying for. It has been quite a while. Back with VOIP plus ADSL.

Interesting system info in the Livebox interface.

Flux descendant possible (kbps) : 2699

What are we actually getting? (downstream – upstream)

Taux de transfert (kbps) 1212 – 326

I hesitate even to ask them to fix that.

Dana made much progress writing up his big bike trip this summer, wherein he rode from Mexico to Canada. The ride was south to north, a direction he decided to take partly based on observations about wind patterns.

Dana went more than 2000 miles on this solo ride. This was surely his most carefully planned ride, yet at the same time a big adventure. You can read all about it at CrazyGuyOnABike.com.

This system currently runs Ubuntu 7.04. The system has a PCI sound card and on motherboard sound. The sound settings default to autodetect. The result is intermittent sound. Sometimes sound works after a system boot. Sometimes it does not work.

It seems the sound cards themselves get indexed differently depending on something happening at boot time. Currently the sound card is in the zeroth position, with the on board sound in the first.

$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [AudioPCI       ]: ENS1371 - Ensoniq AudioPCI
                      Ensoniq AudioPCI ENS1371 at 0xc400, irq 11
 1 [nForce2        ]: NFORCE - NVidia nForce2
                      NVidia nForce2 with ALC650E at 0xe0001000, irq 10

As a result autodetect does not. No sound comes out of the speakers until I unplug the cord from the motherboard sound jack and plug it into the sound card jack.

A workaround for this problem is in the Sound Preferences Gnome app, System > Preferences > Sound. I manually set the sound playback, and sound now works.

Clearly this is a bug in autodetection. I should not have to rewire my sound, nor should I have to set preferences to get the sound to work regularly.

When we were in Texas, I took capsules of St. John’s wort (in French, millepertuis). Mom says the flowers along the driveway here are St. John’s wort. In the US the capsules were sold as a dietary supplement and treatment for mild depression.

The capsules seemed to have an effect like ripping the tops off weeds. I ran out of St. John’s wort. The depression has come back stronger than before, though still variable from day to day. (Obviously this is a good day, or I would not have the energy to write this.) I feel as if the roots of the problem had thickened and gained strength, sending up even more of a thicket than last time.

In retrospect I could feel that even as the treatment was taking hold. It seemed to leave the core of the depression intact. Yet psychologically it prevented me from taking the problem seriously.

That could explain why mentally ill folks go off their medications. Imagine having trouble with paranoia, then getting a prescription for medicine (i.e. a toxic substance, depending on dosage) that leaves everything you suspect in place but makes you unable to connect the loose ends.

Depression should cancel paranoia out. Paranoia depends on you being the object of complex, probably nearly hidden, evil intentions, which implies that they would have to consider you worthy of being made the object of some sort of plot. Depression helps you realize that you are not worthy of that much attention.

For perhaps 18 months our Internet service provider here at the house was Free.fr. We experienced progressively more and more interruptions with Free. In the end after a three-day outage and some debugging, I had narrowed the problem down either to their modem-router-VOIP box or to their AC/DC adapter, and decided to call. Had to call just after 5 a.m. to be able to get through on their pay-per-minute help line… to tell them their equipment was broken.

They refused to replace both the modem and the adapter at the same time. So while I was a work Nathalie did some debugging at a friend’s house and located the problem in the adapter. The box was working.

Next morning at 5 a.m. the technician agreed to have an adapter sent out. But he was not able to tell me when that would actually happen. So I tried a few adapters, and finally found one that got the box working at our house. Momentarily. Unfortunately the amperage was too high, I suspect, because it burnt up something in the box after only a few minutes of Internet access.

Following morning at 5 a.m. the same technician took my call. I explained it was probably my fault, but could he send a box. The answer was, “Not until you get the adapter.” Of course there was no way to determine when the adapter would be sent. (This was about a week ago. We have heard nothing about the adapter.)

At this stage Nathalie and I gave up on Free. We changed Internet service providers to Orange, which is France Telecom. In the past we had had an FT ADSL line that always worked. It was paid for by Sun. Sun decided to cancel the line. (Like a jerk I still do work here after hours.) FT did not have a VOIP option. I call the US quite often, so wanted that option. That’s what led to Free.

Darn VOIP.

Anyway Orange seemed okay. They sent the material right away. It came this morning. When I tried setting everything up I could not get a DSL connection. Switched DSL filters. Switched RTC lines. Switched the plugs for the adapter.

I called Orange pay-per-minute support. The technician basically told me it was my fault, since things looked good on their end. I had been following their doc to the letter, even using a Windows box to use their for-idiots install CD. The technician told me I could have someone come out to the house, but it would cost me 50 euros. I was too angry to say anything except that I would think about it.

So I got out the old ADSL modem, just a modem nothing else, that had come with the FT offer. Booted Linux so I could see what was going on. Configured the modem with pppoeconf. That worked instantly. Here are the speed test results, http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results/id/11874502734133286179.html.

I deleted some mail that had been building up. Visited a few sites. Called Orange back, pay-per-minute, to help the technician come to the realization that the equipment they had sent me was defective. Their box could not synchronize the DSL line.

The call went on longer than necessary. But at least the technician agreed to get me a new box within 48 hours. Nathalie’s going to try to get them to faire un geste commercial.