Internet connection was down again, a little more than 24 hours after the new wifi modem was installed. WTF? Numerous attempts at re-initializing failed, which made me a bit grumpy. Another (toll free) call to AT&T was in order this morning.
Apparently, the fault was with the connection and not the modem and a service call was required. I was told that the service guy would come by in a time frame of two to three hours, which was fine by me. Five minutes after that call I received a call from the service guy who said he would be arriving in 20-30 minutes. Cool beans, I'm thinking. Eight minutes later he's ringing my doorbell, even cooler beans. He hooks up his magic box and proceeds to get to work, no visit to the basement wiring required. By tweaking the signal strength to the modem all problems were resolved. Total time from the start of the phone call until the time the service guy left was about an hour; I don't think it can get any better than that. Say what you will about faceless corporations, I have to say that AT&T, in this case, was really on the ball.
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Wiring, especially for computer peripherals, has always given me a pain in the keister. In most cases the wires are too damn long; I don't need a four foot mouse cable to a laptop sitting on a table, two feet is more than enough. It seems like there is standard of six feet for a lot of cables, a number surely pulled out of somebody's ass. Usually I can shorten the cable by looping it and securing it with zip-ties, but in the past I've had to roll my own.
My first computer had one serial port and one parallel port, but I had a lot of stuff to connect so I used those old A/B, A/B/C, and A/B/C/D switch boxes. The standard six foot cables were very difficult to loop, I think the parallel cables had 36 wires and did not bend easily but the 50 wire SCSI cables were worse. I ended up getting the stuff I needed from Radio Shack, back when you could buy the necessary connectors and cable by the foot. A lot of fiddly soldering was required, but if I needed a two foot cable I made a two foot cable, dammit. The shortest parallel cable I made was about eight inches long. Good times, but now they're all obsolete and sitting in a box in the closet.
Now, with the construction or modification of my 3D printers the wires are too short and I have to splice in an extra two feet or so of wire. The five stepper motors each have four wires, everything else has two wires, and they're all color coded. But I use gray wire for all the extensions, and as Mr. Beagles pointed out, one wire at a time. Very tedious, but it works out okay and I haven't fried anything (yet).
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Problem solving is a skill I've seen in some people, but in others, not so much. As an educator, perhaps Uncle Ken can elaborate on his observations. Are kids that like puzzles and math naturally better problem solvers; is it an inherent quality or can it be learned? I was thinking of those old grammar school exercises with fractions and long division, not something we usually encounter in our daily lives. But arithmetic and math may be a child's first encounter with logical thinking, or so it seems to me.
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Base 12 is unlikely to replace our decimal notation, but it may still have it's uses. We already use Base 2, Base 3, Base 8, and Base 16 in computer sciences, so there's probably a practical application for Base 12 even if we haven't found it yet.
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John Horner? No need to be so formal, Uncle Ken. You can call him Jack.
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