el-
found it:
amazon.com
-la
ps - you might enjoy reading this:
Typhoon Day
Hello Heinz and Joel, Today is a day everyone in Hong Kong can love. Today is a typhoon day.
Many of us early risers got to the office at 7:30am, not having checked in with the news in our eagerness to do good. After about one and half hours of e-mail processing (for that is what anybody does now at the office, e-mails) we discover that a typhoon is heading straight in and the offices will be evacuated at 11:45am, with the raising of Typhoon #8 flag.
A typhoon day is good for those who do not like their day job, or otherwise has nothing to do in the field, because on such a day, they can do nothing, only properly.
A typhoon day is excellent for those who worship their day job, or otherwise has too much to do at the mine face, because now they have the time to do it right.
Evacuation it is. But first, the wife calls up and says, “Jay, do you think you can go to my office and bring back my computer?”
Be careful. That is a trick question for which there is only one answer, as, “of course dear, and after picking up the PC, I will stop over at the deli and pick up some roast goose for lunch”
After packing the PC from the wife's office, but before picking up the roast goose, I went to the phone store to buy a simple touch-tone telephone, with no bells, whistles, antennas, or rechargeable batteries. I do not know why this point is important, just noting it for possible use later.
I took the double-decker bus home, as is normal, sitting on the upper deck. While passing through the busy section of Wanchai, I spied a fairly well-dressed and properly-fed young man pacing the street in front of the gathering storm, sky was grey, wind blowing, and folks milling all about, hurrying to where they must be before the town shuts down. The young man had a set of sandwich boards dangling around his neck, flapping in the wind. Walking advertisement for a loan shark operation. Oops, I meant sub-prime loan business.
The message, “hey, want to be just like me, sandwich-boarding in the storm, borrow from this outfit I know”. The irony is most likely lost on the milling crowds; I love Hong Kong.
As the bus winds through the crowds and the urban jungle, and begins to meander the winding scenic seascape that is Hong Kong's Southside, I pull up the reading material stored in my geewhizbang Bluetooth enabled palmtop and cycle through the news I had clipped earlier.
While I am reading about the growing popularity in the USA of Reverse Mortgages, I listened to this relaxing MP3 download directed by Heinz and produced by Joel.
Reverse Mortgages. Borrow now, dissolve equity, and evaporate savings, capped off by parties to celebrate achieving 100% equity-free homes. How unconventional.
What will the already heavily debt-ed J6P fall for next? Backward driving SUVs?
Opposite Jobs? Undo Victory? Gold Metal of Under-Achievement? Don't Bring It On? Everyday is Sunday and Every Night is Saturday? Every kid born will be given money to spend and enjoy, and never have to be pay back?
Sweet. Has economic history ended, along with history as Fukuyama knows it, or is Francis simply lost in his own halo (EDIT: save yourselves the USD 25, the book is outdated) ?
Too funny, to think there are actually people who believe that history can end before it ends.
Can you picture it, dear Francis walking the streets of Wanchai, sporting a pair of sandwich boards, advertising the end of history and selling sub-prime debt, while there are folks in nearby neighborhoods who figure history just got started:0)
I now put on Nina Simone's “Feeling Good” on the music system. It is raining giraffes and elephants outside, and it after all is an impromptu three-day weekend inside.
I received my Motorola VoIP Modem from Vonage this week. The hideous visual impact of the modem box was ameliorated by this architect-wannabe who, several Christmas holidays ago, had the foresight to acquire and hoard away an antique brass candlestick phone that had its rotary dial mechanism electronically altered to put out a touch-tone signal.
Can you say “elegant” :0)
The made-in-England GEC phone is of course a collector's item now, as is my new Burberry umbrella. What else do they make in England? Oh yes, fairy tales about Saddam's Mine … I meant Solomon's Mines … no Saddam's WMDs … yeah, that's it … but not fairy tales, just simpler science fiction. The fictions are of course too numerous and too tawdry to qualify as collectors items.
I suppose British Common Law subscribers can now justify pre-emptive war based on a potential enemy possibly possessing the capability to maybe make WMD. I hope Britain will never have any real enemies armed with genuine WMDs. But I am getting off topic again.
The instructions that came with the new VoIP toy were pretty obvious to this onetime electrical engineer: turn off all power supplies, connect NEC DSL modem (2002) to Motorola VoIP modem (2003); then connect Motorola VoIP modem to GEC candlestick phone (circa 1912) and to some generic wireless router of indeterminate age; connect nameless wireless router to Gateway PC (2002); and then turn on power supplies in a simple sequence, successively from the furthest point from the PC, allowing each black box to warm-up, boot-up, download latest patch, and/or crash/breakdown.
I thought about what I was going to do, but just for a moment of several synaptic cycles, not enough to be truly afraid, only adequate to be unthinkingly brave, like politicians before desert adventures.
I thought, “What could possibly go wrong”, intuitively knowing the answer to be “Everything, simply everything, and you will not know what went wrong or why”.
You see, I forgot to ask myself the prime question, “How lucky do I feel today?”
I turned on the power to the DSL modem, and the alarm light went bright red, announcing, “Jay, you know nothing and you are fcuked. Powering down …”
That was two days ago.
The broadband serviceman has since replaced my DSL modem, a butterfly fluttered its wings in the Amazon jungle, a storm is brewing in the coalfields of Shaanxi province in China, and I still did not have VoIP in Hong Kong. The new DSL modem worked, but the minute the Vonage box is introduced in the daisy of boxes as instructed, the network goes down.
I checked and rechecked the connections, tested each individual box on its own, and as far as I could figure, all systems were OK, except the new box from Vonage, while recognized by the daisy-chained network, is simply not doing its duty, and if it is used on its own without the wireless router in front of it, the MS Internet Explorer program would refuse to work, same as the phone.
I have a bunch of relations and friends on my MS Messenger service, and each time I turn on my PC, I run into somebody, in Canada, USA, Latin America, and other time zones, each an expert in something, and several more expert than I in PC network setup. The experience is like having a bunch of folks living inside of my PC: artists, doctors, lawyers, money managers, IT-perts, pretty girls, and good buddies all.
Jack in Canada advised that I should put the Vonage box after the Wireless Router, which is precisely opposite of what Vonage instruction dictated. Of course, so obvious, just do as logical, and not as told, just like the financial market.
Sure enough, my candlestick phone came alive when I dialed its number from the Giga-hertz wireless house phone, with the call routed via the bedroom-based base station, across the Pacific and back again, across the other side of the desk.
As is always in electrical engineering and the war in Mesopotamia, there is always another bug to resolve. The newly alive anachronistic candlestick phone can receive calls via the modern Internet, and can make calls out when hooked to a traditional telephone line, but failed to make outbound calls while connected to the IP network.
My network of PC experts in Messenger Dialogue Box advised that perhaps my ports needed to be forwarded, or I needed a genuine Intel branded wireless router instead of the non-descript piece of junk I have been using in perfect harmony for two years.
I studied the situation close up, and pondered on where the weak link in the network might be … a telephone made 92 years ago hooked into a global fiber optic network … where could the weakness be? Religions a lot of thousand years old spliced into the post-atomic society. What could go wrong? Oops, wrong question.
Right question: Do I feel luck today?
I plugged my newly purchased made-in-China Panasonic touchtone phone, and now I can look forward to losing my phone connection each and every time some instability in some delicate string of software codes within any one of the many boxes leading from my Panasonic phone to the fiber optic mirrors of the Worldwide Internet acts up or shuts down. In the meantime I have VoIP, and the traditional telephone companies are doomed, again, this time may be for real and for keeps.
I feel fortunate that the almost 100-years old but VoIP-enabled candlestick phone is no longer a part of the working network, because the rotary dial mechanism was trying my patience in a severe fashion, and if I drop the heavy brass contraption, I could easily hurt myself.
Conclusion:
WWW / DSL Modem => Wireless Router => Gateway PC works;
WWW / DSL Modem => Vonage => Wireless Router => Candlestick Phone / Gateway PC does not work;
WWW / DSL Modem => Vonage => Candlestick Phone / Gateway PC does not work;
WWW / DSL Modem=> Wireless Router => Vonage => Candlestick Phone / Gateway PC works for incoming calls; and
WWW / DSL Modem => Wireless Router => Vonage => Modern Phone / Gateway PC works, too perfectly, but destroys telephone companies and their investors' equity.
My wife's brother just called her from Germany, on the VoIP setup, not because Europe=>USA=>Hong Kong phone tariff is less expensive than Europe=>Hong Kong charge rate, but because Europe=>USA=>Hong Kong VoIP is clearer than Europe=>Hong Kong traditional fixed line voice quality.
TeoTwawKi is getting closer, and history did not end.
Another observation, there is a lot of water in the sky, and a typhoon brings a lot of it down in a very short time.
Chugs, Jay |
