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I warned you, you succulent egg-sucking liberals, that if you continued to feed poor people, they'd just keep on breeding, and some of them would even vote ...
Oh, damn, more computer problems. Now there seems to be a bug that puts Hamblin prose in my system.
These woes started with a simple problem. We use several computers around the working quarters of our house, which was built back when electricity was something of a novelty, and hauling floppy disks between machines was getting worse than tedious.
The preferred solution, an upscale certified Novell network or the like, looked hideously complex and expensive. All we wanted to do was move files between machines. We didn't need to share scanners and printers or run one machine's program on another machine.
The cheap way is to string a null-modem cable
between the computers. It connects the serial ports, and
data can migrate. All you have to do is build the
cable.
This was easy when our daughter Columbine was at home,
rather than attending college in Gunnison. When she was
about nine, she overheard me cursing one day, came to see
me soldering, and said Gee dad, that looks interesting.
Can I try it?
Gladly I handed her the soldering iron, and she was good at it. As my father once commented, that's the trouble with kids. As soon as they get big enough to be useful, they grow up and leave home.
Anyway, I got out the soldering iron and cobbled together a cable. Invariably I build some solder bridges, and always the iron tip hits the plastic case and fills the house with a loathsome aroma that is likely toxic as well.
The resulting cable ends, before the shields covered the DB-25S connectors -- well, let's just say it's a good thing that Randall Terry never saw them, because my sloppy soldering looked like an abortion and he'd have had maniacs blocking the house and chaining the doors.
But the cable checked out with a continuity tester, and I strung it between the two closest machines. I fired up a communications program on both, and voila, I could make files migrate. I could even take control of a remote machine with the dangerous CTTY command (see your DOS manual, and if at all possible, do your experimenting on your employer's machine and time).
Then I discovered that my old version of PC-Tools had a
program called COMMUTE
that really simplified the
process.
Visions of a poor man's network danced in my head. Ought to be a magazine article or two in this, and so I started making notes.
Now, tie the central machine to the farthest machine, and we'd be all wired. I built a new cable, tested it between the two close machines, plugged it into the far machine, then turned it on.
I turned it off quickly, as soon as I smelled the smoke. Not quickly enough, for where I had just enjoyed three working computers, I now had three dead computers.
How on earth could a serial cable -- about five volts, and tiny wire -- carry enough electricity to cause such havoc?
The local gurus, luridly fascinated by my misadventure, conducted an autopsy. The last machine was plugged into a different power circuit; investigation revealed that, despite appearances, it was actually on an old two-wire circuit, not a modern three-wire grounded circuit like that on the other two machines.
When that distant machine powered up, this produced a substantial difference in potential between the two ends of the signal ground connection. We're still counting the carnage: trashed I/O boards, a burnt SCSI controller, dead floppy drives.
Fortunately, we'd borrowed money for some of this, and the bank insisted that we buy insurance, which is supposed to cover these accidents. I'll certainly let you know if Safeware finds a way to weasel out of paying.
By tomorrow, we should have everything back together, and within a month or two, the bugs will be out of the system. Here's one helpful household hint: run a voltmeter between computer cases before you connect them with a serial cable.
Now, a lot of folks don't have computers around the house, so I'll pass on a handy tip I learned from Greg Truitt, the local carpenter with a journalism degree (every mountain town has one, or should have one, right?).
We were discussing a fellow citizen whom I'll call Loathsome Jerk, and I mentioned encountering Mr. Jerk recently, to my great annoyance.
He never bothers me,
Greg said.
What's your trick?
I did some little job for him...
Greg began.
And I bet the SOB never paid you,
I finished.
Don't get ahead of me,
Greg said. I never even
sent him the bill for the $15. But he knows he owes me the
money, right? And so whenever he sees me coming down the
sidewalk, he'll cross the street, rather than take a chance
on meeting me.
Don't you think it's worth $15 not to ever have to
deal with Loathsome Jerk?
Brilliant idea, and I wish I'd thought of it myself.
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