Somebody please educate this industry about the difference between a designer and a developer! It is hard enough to find a job to get my foot in the door with web stuff, but to deal with employer ignorance only compounds the situation.

My wife runs into this all the time. She is more of a designer and she often comes across job listings from employers who say they want a web designer, and then they begin to list all these development tools that they expect this "designer" to know, like PHP, Python, advanced JavaScript, C#, .NET, PERL, etc.

If you can find someone who is both a designer and a developer and is good at either one (or both!), then I want to meet that person!

My problem is I am looking for web developer jobs, and I see the same thing. They're looking for a web developer, but then go on to say they expect this person to do design as well - including the graphics!

C'mon, people! This is EARTH! We are HUMANS! We need to eat, etc., and we're also not willing to work for peanuts to bring you the moon! Oh, and this is America, too, and I am offended when I see all of our jobs shipped overseas to places like India! But that's another story all its own.

I just wish employers would start being a little more ... realistic!


I'm a developer, not a designer, dammit!

Well, not really. If I were truly a god, it would not have taken this long.

It has been a long and winding road. This ordeal with my router. It died one night. Since then, I have attempted to replace it on three separate occasions. The most recent attempt was to be the last attempt. And it was. But I followed up on a lead from the guy I bought the last [bad] router from, who said there was a Yahoo! group about this router, so I dug it up. One of the first messages I read there was that the moderator of the group was thinking of shutting the group down, since he no longer had that model router.

But then I stumbled upon a message that mentioned a hardware reset. For some [monumentally stupid] reason, this hardware reset method is not mentioned anywhere in the documentation that came with the router. If it was, it would have saved me a lot of time and money. I have probably thrown $50 at this stupid problem, and wasted a ton of time. This does not make me happy.

But what I am happy about is that I tried this little hardware reset trick - which involves shorting pins 3 and 8 together on the COM port and turning the unit on and waiting for the ready light to blink 8 times - and I managed to bring my original router back to life! WOO HOO! Now everything is back to the original configuration - original router at the DSL modem, and my old LinkSys hub at the linux box. And everything is just humming right along.

Yes, my last attempt to replace the router was the final attempt. It did not want to be replaced. It was not destined to be replaced. It's destiny, after all, was to be resurrected. This concludes the act in the center ring.

This way to the egress.

So, you see, I simply can't let a good thing die. I had a router die a while back, and I have been trying to replace it with a router of the same model. I seem to be obsessed with getting it back, like a parent who has lost a child, I suppose. I just liked that router and the way it worked.

Last night, I just picked up a third replacement. The first two had problems. My original router died, mysteriously, when I changed a configuration option and rebooted it. The first replacement I bought from ebay simply didn't work. The second replacement, also from ebay, had a bad port on it. The third replacement was from a local individual, and I was determined to get a good one this time.

I carried my laptop out to the guy's place and tested the unit thoroughly before I paid for it and took it home. I was convinced I had finally found my replacement. But, of course, nothing related to computers actually works as it should.

Today, I tried to hook it up. What a fiasco. Well, it could have been worse, but being that this was my latest (and final) attempt in a long stream of fiascos, it didn't sit well that this attempt was no different (i.e. there were problems).

What a fucking surprise.

I unplugged the router that was supposed to be the temporary replacement, and plugged my latest acquisition in its place. I have a hub plugged into port 2 that connects to the linux server and another computer, but it didn't want to play. No green light. To make a long story short, I have another hub (different make and model) that used to connect to the linux box and my other computer, so I swapped out the hubs to restore my original configuration, and it worked. Just not on port 2.

WTF is wrong with port 2? Port 2 doesn't appear to work with any of my computers...except for the laptop that I used to test it with at the guy's house where I bought the router. Right now, the router and original hub are plugged in and working. I am at least able to type up this blog entry and access my linux box, but port 2 of the router is a hateful, hateful little bit mite. Needless to say (though I am going to say it anyway), I am PISSED!

Well, this was my final attempt to replace this router with another of the same model. It won't happen again. I have come to the conclusion that, although the original router was great and served me well while it was working, it seems that particular model is fraught with problems. Either that, or I am simply not meant to have one. There is another router out there somewhere with my name on it. I just would like to find it, soon.



Router 0: My original router. Died mysteriously - no longer talks to the WAN or the COM port.
Router 1: First replacement. Does not talk to the LAN (no green lights), though the COM port works.
Router 2: Second replacement. Port 1 is bad, but otherwise the unit works.
Router 3: Third replacement. Port 2 is flakey.

All routers are destined for burial. Or I might hang on to them for a nice July 4th display. BOOM!!

The Bermuda Triangle paid me a visit.

The electricity in this apartment is very strangely wired. My "shop", which is external to the apartment (which is strange enough) is wired (at least partially) on the same circuit with my bedroom and one of my roommate's rooms. Frequently, I have to contend with the power going out when my roommate runs her toaster oven, microwave and refrigerator at the same time, tripping the breaker.

But yesterday morning, something was weird. I walked into my shop and discovered one of my computers was powered off. My PC, of course. I had some files open that I had not saved the previous night, so they were lost. But when I tried to turn the computer on, I got nothing.

Click.

There was a thunderstorm the previous day, not too long after dark - which is extremely rare out here - but there were no ill effects. I was working on the PC while watching the light show off in the distance, and eventually it came to an end. My wife came home and I went inside for the night - everything was fine when I left the computers.

I have a lamp by my bed that is touch-sensitive. To turn it on or off, all I have to do is touch it. Anywhere. It has four settings - dim, medium, bright, and off. Before rolling over to go to sleep, I turned off the light as I do every night.

The next morning (yesterday morning) I woke up to discover that my wife had already left for work, and I noticed my light was on (the dim setting). I thought maybe she turned it on, either accidentally or on purpose, perhaps while kissing me in my sleep before leaving for work. However, last night I connected the dots - the lamp must have turned itself on in response to some weird power glitch, probably in conjunction with whatever turned off my PC.

There is a little switch on the back of the power supply on the PC that cuts the power to the supply (computer power supplies have one circuit that is always on, which enables them to respond to events, like Wake On LAN, or pressing the power button), but turning off this switch effectively turns the supply off, completely.

My BIOS is configured to so that the computer will return to its previous state following a power failure (that is, if the computer is off when power is lost, the computer will remain off after power is restored. If the computer is on when power goes out, the computer will turn back on when power comes back). When I turned the power supply off and back on, the computer immediately powered up.

This suggests to me that whatever brought the computer down was a very unusual event. It left the power supply in a state where it detected a power failure and shut down (at least partially), but did not detect enough of a power failure to realize it needed to restart.

Weird.

The event logs recorded nothing unusual, and my drives all appear to be intact, so I am very relieved that I avoided a disaster. The Mac seemed to be completely unaware of the event, as it was still up and running. But if I learned a (repeated) lesson here, it was that one can never take computers for granted, or save often enough.

I had a good laugh just a few minutes ago. After eating a late breakfast and watching an episode of the old Cosmos series, I happened upon Who Wants to be a Millionaire just before turning off the television.

I surmised it was a newlywed version, as there was a couple in the hot seat, and the man made a comment about what kind of wedding gifts they might expect. But that really has nothing to do with the story.

There was a question on the board about which country bordered on five different seas. The couple opted to use the 50/50 lifeline, and the two answers that remained were Italy and Turkey. They still didn't know which answer to choose, so they polled the audience.

It has been a long, long time since I have seen this show, but apparently they now include AOL users as part of the audience and have some way to tally votes from them. The studio audience thought the answer was Italy, and the AOL audience thought the answer was Turkey. The couple still could not choose, so they chose to end the game and walk away with $16,000.

Then they revealed the correct answer: Italy.

I had to laugh.

I don't think there was any other appropriate response. I can remember the days of the Internet when AOL - which was once its own separate online service - became connected to the Internet. People who had no idea what the Internet was were suddenly jumping online, like a bunch of renegade kids crashing a respectible pool party. I remember reading something that someone wrote about how, if the Internet was truly a super highway, that AOL would be a big bus spewing black smoke and with passengers throwing rotten cabbage at other drivers.

The Internet community (i.e. from the true Internet culture that existed before John Q. Public and relatives were granted access) looked at AOL users with much disdain as the tainted Internet culture became increasingly eroded with each new free AOL floppy disk that arrived in some poor soul's mail box. The AOL was perceived as a sort of plague, which has since spread to a myriad of Internet Service Providers, giving birth to the commercialization and degeneration of the World Wide Web and the many other services that made up the Internet (Gopher? What's that?).

So, here is a group of AOL users, watching a trivia program on television while sitting at their computers. The audience is polled about a question on the screen, and they get it wrong. Now, imagine this if you will. Some scruffy looking guy in his underwear, sitting at the computer AND watching television, sees a trivia question pop up on the television. Keep in mind, THE GUY IS ONLINE! Practically everything you ever wanted to know is at his fingertips. All he has to do is do a quick Google search and find the answer. Boom! But, instead, he decides to fancy himself an expert in geography, scratches is ass, and votes for Turkey.

I just imagined a head of rotting cabbage somewhere nearby.

I guess, when you look at the maps, even then there is some question about which is the correct answer (depending on the maps you get). But, still, the whole thing just made me laugh, because I was one of those Internet users who hated to see the influx of AOL users who knew nothing about computers, and who thought the Internet was simply, and only, the World Wide Web, and who thought it was fun to distribute chain letters and clog up usenet with hundreds of "me too" messages. They just had a reputation for being degenerates. And stupid. Not all of them are, of course, but those who aren't, unfortunately, are perceived as such by association.

As far as I am concerned, AOL is still a plague. But, like any cancer, you learn to live with it, mourn what was lost, and press on.

I had an appointment to see the doctor today. I was also expecting the landlord to come over for an inspection (in my absence). I have a cat door that I installed as a seperate piece in a sliding glass door (that prevents the door from closing all the way) and through that separate piece is a hole for the network and telephone cable that leads out the the "shop" where I work at my computer.

We're not supposed to have cats, so I wanted to hide the cat door, which meant disconnecting the network and phone cables. Which I did. And I removed the cat door and went to see my doctor.

When I returned, I plugged the network cable back in and got...nothing. I could access the other computers on my LAN, but could not reach the Internet. I thought I was looking at another act in the Computer Circus, so I took some time to troubleshoot.

After rebooting the modem and the router, I realized I had a good connection. I could ping IP addresses, but not names (like google.com). I presumed that perhaps something was wrong with the DNS. I could ping the gateway, but neither DNS address responded. So, I presumed there must be something wrong with the service provider. I called them up, and sure enough - they reported that both DNS servers were having problems.

Whew!

The problem was not mine! OH - and there's more good news! I won an auction for a replacement router - one exactly like the one I had that died a while back. Finally! This one should work, and it has a return policy attached to it, so I should be back in business. Well, not that I am out of service now, but I just don't like the way this "new" router works as far as the configuration interface and the information it (doesn't) display.

Anyway, at least I got a taste of what it is like to be at home OFF THE COMPUTER for a little while today. My doctor suggests that I do that more often - like at least three times a week. So I have to figure out what I like to do that is aerobic. Perhaps I will take up tennis, since there are courts just half a block down the hill from here. In fact, I think I'll pick up some tennis balls tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket!

We'll see.