As you may have noticed, I’m experimenting with using the replacement phone to moblog, as i was with the Treo more and more. Unhappily, the results-to-date are unsatisfactory. For example, I have not found a way to title the posts as they are sent; the phone-side app refuses to permit the alteration of the subject line. Additionally, using the phone-style keypad entry technique is far less intuitive than the Treo’s full QWERTY. On the plus side, the Nokia’s imaging chip does a much better job with color reproduction than that in the Treo.
Du Vin
I spent a long year of my adolescence in Switzerland with my family, living in a city on the northern coast of Lake Geneva, or lac Leman as the locals have it. Lausanne is the capital of the canton of Vaud, with the Valais just to the east one of the two primary centers for Francophone Swiss agriculture, primarily vineyards and orchards (not, of course, considering dairy, a much larger segment of the economy).
Both the Valaisiennes and the Vaudois produce a characteristic regional wine. As I recall, in The Valais, it’s a dry red known as Dôle. In Vaud, it’s a snappy dry white called Fendant (which is also made in the Valais). A similar wine, from the same species of grape, is vinted to the west of Switzerland in france where it’s called Chasselas. I believe the names in each case are drawn from the grape varietals, but not being a wine expert, really don’t know.
The Fendants are vinted from community-managed vinyeards that line the northeastern shores of the lake, steep terraced slopes that are unbeleiveably scenic to drive through. Every couple of miles you wind through a little cluster of neat, thick walled buildings, and somewhere nearby you’ll find the village’s caveau, where the wine is available. I think the wine is also made in the caves, but can’t recall.
This wine is commonly available durring the summer and served at the various community festivals in the region and is treated informally as the correct complement to a midday meal of sausage and cheese and the like. I suppose in some ways one could liken it to the way Americans drink beer in the summertime. Unlike beer, however, the Swiss drink it in tiny, near cylindrical glassed that I suppose must hold about two shots of liquid. It’s common for these glasses to be emblazoned with the heraldry of the town holding he festival or the location of the dining establishment. The wine, in essence, formed my palate for white wine, and to a greater or lesser extent the degree to which a white diverges from this crisp, apple-like dry white with some overtones of salt and sometimes a hint of sulfur determines the personal attraction to the wine.
As the wine is primarily produced for local consumption, it’s quite rare for it to be exported in any quantity, and in the twenty years since I was last in Switzerland, I have only had Swiss Fendant a couple of times, most recently about six years ago at Le Gourmand in Ballard. Since then, I have made a habit of pestering wine stewards all over the city for news of any imported Swiss fendant. I just missed a few bottles last fall, I understand, to my frustration.
Imagine my joy, then, when last week I found a bottle of Puget Sound produced Chasselas, made by Mount Baker Vineyards, an outfit sadly lacking in web presence. Priced at a reasonable nine bucks, the bottle is a slightly sweeter incarnation of this than the pseudoplatonic ideal resident in my memory. But it’s pretty close and I’m thrilled to see it being produced here. Vaud is at approximately the same latitude as Mount Rainier, not Mount Baker. Baker is aligned with the French region of Alsace, where the grape is also vinted. The Alsatian versions are also sweeter. The Mount Baker Vineyards approach seems to me closer to the Swiss than to the Alsatian. I look forward to more.
Network Cable Madness
I’m losing my mind over a home LAN problem, so here’s the gory bits to help me know if I’ve properly defined the problem.
My current LAN topology is roughly this:
ISP access point, no DHCP –> fixed IP DSL modem, bridged –> 5-port 10/100 Ethernet switch –> 2 fixed-IP desktop units, 1 fixed-IP Airport acting as DHCP for both wired and wireless network, 1 DHCP IP desktop unit.
The desktop DHCP box picks up the Airport IPs just fine and everything in the Airport cloud behaves properly, which allows all the client machines to use a printer made available via an Airport Express unit.
I have run a 50-foot ethernet cable from the point of entry / modem / switch up through the floor to the center of the building on the top floor where the Airport sits, giving housewide coverage. What I need to do is add another 10/100 hub or switch in that location to allow me to add more top-floor cabled devices to the LAN.
I have successfully inserted three 10/100 hubs into the network in the following topology:
5-port 10/100 switch -> additional n-port 10/100 hub device -> Airport
This works so long as the in port on the additional device is in uplink mode or connected to the first router via crossover cable. The Airport, in this configuration, remains connected to the second hub by the long cable.
So far so good.
When I tote the new hubs upstairs and add the hub to the LAN via the long cable, the hubs report linkstate. However, when I plug the Airport into an available port, the hubs do not report good linkstate to the Airport, all the Airport client devices, wired and wireless, lose connectivity.
As far as I can tell, the only change in the topology is that in the first instance, the cable out from the first hub into the uplink port on the second hub is about 4 feet long, and the cable out from the second hub to the Airport is fifty feet long. In the second case, this is reversed, such that the cable out from the first hub is fifty feet and the cable out from the second hub is about four feet. It’s my understanding that the rated length for the hubs and most similar devices is 100 meters. I just do not get what is going on.
Gastly
PSE, sweet talked into inspecting our new pipes, found another leak and on those grounds did not reactivate the gas. We have a different service company coming tomorrow at 8am.
My parents are currently on the tarmac at SeaTac, taxi-ing into their gate before coming here.
Gas Crisis, day 3
Still no heat, hot water, operable stoves or working dryers over here at Hard Luck Acres.
Friends of labor will be saddened to hear that three days into the bathing strike, forces greater than the massed will of the workingman (my wife) intervened to direct me to a cold shower – rimshot puhleeze!
Thank you! I’ll be here all week!
Of course, this would all go down the same week my folks are swinging by for their first visit to the house. I called and gave ’em the lowdown this afternoon. I hope we have all the mod cons up and running before they show up. My folks are tough – heatless homes and cold showers are no new events in their experience of travel – but if I recall correctly they are both over seventy and might prefer heated air and warm water.
Phoning it in
Happily, I have been able to get iSync to work with the substitute phone that Eric was kind enough to send to me, the Nokia 6620. Aggravatingly, the phone is officially unsupported by Cingular. This seems to be the source of some peculiar issues and flakiness in connectivity for data. Also, at first blush, there are some issues with the way that Opera renders GMail and other Google Services pages. I’m guessing this is some kinda AJAX javascript deal and that possibly the version of Opera on the phone needs to be updated.
Similarly, I can’t find a decent SMMTP/POP mail client in the apps on the phone. This makes sense as steering the phone user to operate the SMS client on the phone builds revenue for the carrier. The fuckers.
Finally, numeric keypad text entry is clearly proof that Satan is active in the world today.
That's the ticket
Today I received word that all my active writers over at SIFFBlog will be granted press passes for the festival. I’m kind of in shock.
I do not have time to use a pass, so I did not apply – I suppose now it’s incumbent upon me to figure out what events I am to attend. I need to get in touch with a couple of folks who haven’t been writing for the blog but should be, too.
Baby steps
Well, the cable run upstairs from the basement was a success. However, the Linksys is fighting with the Airport for DHCP supremacy in an all-too-familar smackdown. Yesterday I was able to hang the Airport off the Linksys and still have the Airport hand out DHCP assignments and manage the client cloud effectively; today, I’m getting no love from the bitmonsters. Still, I now have RJ-45 Ethernet run from the DSL entry point to the very center of the house both upstairs and down, a good place to be if you envision a mixed wired/wireless network with a server closet.
All of this after some heavy bushwhacking that yielded a nice haystack size pile of slaughtered and dismembered tree parts.
Routes
Linksys BESFR41 docs, Ars Technica writeup. I’m patching thin into my home LAN as an upstairs hub and need to figure out if I want to let it run DHCP or keep it on the Airports. I also need to see what havoc the default config might enforce on stuff like Appletalk and so forth.
Oh today’s a busy day – drilling cable runs, pruning trees, cleaning house.
The same day I squashed my cell-phone, it should be noted, Viv accidentally attached her iPod to a magnetic-latch closure on her cell-phone case. The iPod was described to me as “stuck to the case.” Hearing this, I had no great hope that the tiny hard drive was functional, and indeed, after much waving of chicken feet and casting of entrails, I pronounced the device dead. Happily, it was well under warranty and so we took it to the Apple Store in U Village and they immediately replaced it.
Further adding to the week of technical misery, my car’s right turn light finally popped out of the crunched fender it has been doggedly clinging to for the past few years, and it’s currently taped in place. We haven’t been able to find the time this weekend to get it to a shop but it’s clearly necessary now.
Gruesome
So, speaking generally, the skinny on my smashed Treo is: I’m SOL. Apparently the Treo 700p is due out in mid-May (that’s the 700 with PalmOS on it instead of Windows Mobile), but Palm hasn’t made a formal announcement on this yet. That means that even used Treo 650s are running around $300 on eBay. Forum postings indicate that having a hissy fit on the phone with your provider might sometimes result in a replacement discounted phone.
I’m leaning in the direction of locating a vanilla candy-bar phone that I can use until the 700p is out and then assessing.
The screen is utterly cracked and I can’t get the phone to wake up, as the key guard feature requires a button press. However, incoming calls do activate the phone and while the display is about 50% obscured by a black fog-like area the touchscreen works perfectly well.
I did locate a Treo repairman, but the base rate to fix a dual screen and keyboard failure, including parts and labor, is over $200. My guess is that after the 700w comes out $200 will be the average resale price on eBay for the 650.