Damn, I say, Damn Telstra AND overseas help desks

No use so far.  What with now 5 Level 1 technicians turning up ( to no avail as they don’t do network stuff, just fiddle with wireless router ).

The root cause of the outage in North Adelaide over Christmas now appears to have been an earthquake, would you believe, shaking infrastructure up.

I was more suspicious now more than ever that, while Telstra had claimed to have returned service to North Adelaide, they had shoncked it.

I thought I had worked out the problem, but it didn’t make sense, whenever my desktop machined was down or up loading the router would loose connection.  My wife’s laptop didn’t seem to do it, but I could bring the home LAN down on queue.

The wireless card in my machine may be flaky and was “jamming” the air …

Nope didn’t make sense.

Dr-PC came in and voila.  Despite a quick test the other day, when it looked like the cable end was fine, the Dr-PC tech proved the cable was the problem.  When I did a quick check while the overseas help desk operator was on the line, since the problem is intermittent, of course, the cable seemed fine with a wired connection while it was up.  So the phone help desk sent us another Level 1 technician # 5.

So, we have a written report from Dr-PC to jam down Telstra’s throat, the Dr-PC technician gave a verbal report to Telstra phone whacker and we’ve still to get the cable fixed.

Over 2 months now.

Damn Telstra

Go figure, I get a couple of weeks off over Christmas.  I start on the Altera FPGA training but things slow down and then stop.  Telstra lost services in North Adelaide about Boxing day and today I am only on because I am tethered to my Optus phone.

It was quite debilitating to be off-line, I didn’t realize how much I rely on just skipping over the Net to get info AND over Christmas to boot.  Go figure, as Telstra had bought out FOXTEL the FOXTEL was broken as well.

Even though we still had a home LAN, so I could move forward on my firmata over bluetooth and sl4a experiments.  Got both PyBluez and sl4a bluetooth flashing LED but sl4a connections are flaky and drop out so PyBluez seems the better option.  Still trying to get romeo motor drive working.  There seems to be a problem setting up the PWM pins (5 and 6 in the case of the Romeo).

For a little therapy I knocked up a pin-out map for both the MAX shield I have and the Romeo.  So for your viewing pleasure:

Mega sensor shield mapping

Romeo pinouts

On the upside, my FPGA and CPLD boards have turned up so I can start fiddling with those as well.

Although, that last pesky subject for my Masters was paid for so another 12 weeks slaving over the books away from my hobbies starts in a couple of weeks.  Last subject though so I can relax after that – except for that nasty Master’s Thesis I have to write.