computing

About five years ago, I built my home computer. At the time, it was a middle-of-the-road machine with good components. Alas, two weeks ago the machine failed… completely. There’s an old joke that electronics run on “magic smoke.” This is a reference to the acrid smell emitted by electronics when something goes terribly wrong.

Although my machine didn’t actually emit any “magic smoke,” it did come to a complete failure – no lights, no POST messages, no indication of life. It was an ex-parrot. I’ll tag the geek specifics lower in the story.

After digging around in the garage for a couple of hours, I managed to get a partially operational “Franken-PC” running. It won’t do sound, can’t talk to the printer, and is very slow – but it gets me onto the Internet.

I’m hoping to secure enough parts to bring the machine into the current millennia within the next couple of weeks. Until then, two of the eight cylinders are operating. 

Geek stuff: The failure is centered around old, bulging capacitors on the motherboard. It appears that several of the old electrolytic capacitors around the power supply connection socket have failed. There are others (associated with USB ports) that had failed previously. Its seems a dubious use of time and money to attempt to replace the capacitors on this five-year-old motherboard.

The Franken-PC motherboard actually is in worse shape (for capacitor failure), but none of the problems are critical for CPU/RAM/Network/disk controller, so the machine gets me onto the Internet. The Franken-PC is a single-core, mobile AMD processor with 2G RAM. It clocks out performance that is similar to a nine-year-old Pentium 4 chip. If only doing a single task (one browser, or just Word) it does okay. Just don’t attempt to run multiple applications, anything requiring heavy processing (such a video editing), anything that requires sound, or anything that needs to be printed.

I’m hoping to replace the motherboard, CPU, and RAM in the next few weeks. We’ll see what kind of deal I can find at NewEgg.com!

While I enjoy most Microsoft products, I found that the Windows Media Player isn’t my favorite. It performs well enough for most people, but I’m a little pickier. My newest machine is now four and a half years old, so any gains in performance are delightful to me. I’ve elected to switch back to Winamp as my default music player. The price is right too – you can get it for free.

The biggest drawback to Winamp are the hoops you must jump through when installing the application. First, the opportunity to choose the wrong edition (say, one that costs money) is quite easy. Second, during the installation the manufacturer (AOL) makes several attempts to hijack the user’s home page and other preferences, as well as install extra software. These assaults are easily avoided by geeks, but since they are the default options I’m sure normal mortals will fall prey to them.

Winamp plays my MP3 collection more cleanly that Windows Media player and supports “plug-ins” that allow the user to customize their experience. For me, there is a plug-in that I really adore: Stereo Tool. The simple name belays the coolness. The plug-in was developed by a fellow named Hans van Zutphen and is designed to moderate the differences in volume between different songs. Hans gives the plug-in away – pretty cool. Be warned: some of those previously save performance gains are lost with the use of the Stereo Tool. For me, the ROE (return on enjoyment) is well worth it. If there is one failing of Stereo Tool, it would be the incredible flexibility available in the plug-in - which is needed by radio broadcasters.

Here’s more detail about how Hans’ plug-in works for the geeks. Stereo Tool uses the same concepts used by commercial radio stations to get consistent loudness – multiband compression and limiting. The heart of the plug-in is a ten-band compressor/limiter (which has separate compressor and limiting functions) to provide a very good approximation of the radio station experience. If you’d like to learn more about the geeky details, feel free to drop me a line, or check out Han’s website.
 

Do we really need another way to stay in touch? Well, maybe not. However, if a daughter, who is 2,000 miles away, gives us a way to be part of her life we'll participate.

Twitter (established in 2006) is considered to be a "microblog" with "social networking" implications. It's similar to a cell phone text message with a broader audience of friends and longer lifespan. In fact, the messages (also known as, "tweets") are often sent from a person's cell phone. The "tweets" often contain random information from a person's day - what's for lunch, events that are fun, events that are challenging, etc. The message is limited to 140 characters.

Some large companies, such as Microsoft, actively use twitter as a method for distributing information to targetted audiences. They often send a short title, followed by a link to a website with more information. I haven't really begun to dig into very many of these feeds, but I can understand why some people find them infectiously interesting. We'll see over the next few weeks if it continues to hold my interest; with additional trips to Washington D.C. already schedules, it could prove to be a neat way to share daily events with Anne.

This is a FIOS follow-up from our outage last week.

Thursday

The Internet and phone services through FIOS went out in the morning. That afternoon I called the FIOS service phone number. An automated system answered, ran a battery of tests, determined that a service technician would need to personally review the box; it then created a trouble ticket for our outage; I was to be contacted “shortly” to schedule an appointment.

Friday

No contacts were received to schedule an appointment.

At 1:00 p.m. I called the service number again. This time the automated system recognized that there was an outstanding ticket and routed my call to a human. The service representative ran a battery of tests to confirm the ticket was correct (including having a "technician" review the results) before agreeing that there was a problem and a technician would need to see the system at our house. The service rep would not send anyone to the house without my guarantee that someone was at home. He said, "Call back when you're at home, then we'll dispatch someone."

I left work early and went home. At 3:00 p.m. I called the service number again. The automated system once again routed my call to a human, who had to run the same tests a third time to confirm there was a problem. He told me, “We will have to schedule a technician to visit your house. The earliest slot we have available is tomorrow, between 8:00 a.m. and noon.”

Given my past experience, I decided to take the earliest available slot, even though it was the same time as the biggest football game of the year: Ohio State vs. Michigan.

Saturday

Even though the Internet and phone services were still out, the HD television service was working fine. Ohio State was happily trouncing Michigan when I received voicemail on my cell phone from Verizon. The dispatcher reported that they were unable to locate a technician to visit our house – I should expect a call later.

A technician called at 1:00 p.m. to report that he was “in the area” and would be at the house shortly. At 1:30 he appeared and began running local tests on our ONT. He reported, “It looks like you have a problem with your ONT. I have a spare in the truck – I’ll have it running in no time.”

Full service was restored at 3:00 p.m. after the installation of our third ONT in five months… only to have some of the HDTV channels fail by 5:00 p.m. Another call to Verizon, another system reset, and all services appear to be working.

Summary

FIOS is shiny, cool, and unreliable. When it works, it’s unbeatable for performance – unfortunately, it fails far too often for most people... only geeks should fight this beast.

Even after more than 25 years of personal computing, it is still filled with mysteries and snake oil. Case in point: the $70 cable. Since Jessica left for college, I rebuilt her old computer into a simple machine that could be used with our family room television. We hope to use the computer for surfing the Internet and playing back music.

To connect to the TV, I needed to purchase a "DVI" cable. <geek>The TV is a 65 DLP that supports 1920x1080 through a DVI connection.</geek> I visited several local stores, including the various Office * stores. In each case, I discovered that they only carried a $70 cable - but had advertised a much less expensive cable ($20) on their website. I was advised that the less expensive cable was an "Internet special only."

Realizing that the cable was hardly worth $20 to me, I elected to visit my most trusted on-line retailer - NewEgg.com. A quick search at NewEgg.com demonstrated the absurdity of the $70 cables - 54 different options, all but 4 under $40 (including some at 50 feet long), most less than $20. I found a name-brand, comparable cable for $7 at NewEgg.com. Shipping was $4. It will be at the house early next week with a total cost of $11.

If I could have found a cable for less than $20 locally, I would have purchased it. Instead, the local retailers get nothing. Beware the snake oil...