09:15 – I misspoke yesterday. Barbara’s parents are actually moving into their actual apartment today, rather than the guest apartment. She left a few minutes ago for her parents’ house to start hauling some of their boxed up stuff over to the new apartment. The movers are coming later today to move the furniture and other large items. I’ll probably head over there tomorrow morning after everything is in place and they’re settled in to get the TV, stereo, and other electronics connected and working.
We started yesterday on a new batch of 30 biology kits, printing labels and labeling bottles and envelopes. Labeling, filling, and sealing containers is the bulk of the work. After that, it’s just final assembly of all the subassemblies.
Our phone service cutover happened sometime yesterday. The PhonePower adapter showed up in the mail mid-afternoon, just in time. It comes with a little folded pamphlet with installation instructions. I was delighted to see that their recommended setup put the terminal adapter between the cable modem and our router, figuring that would solve all of the problems I had with PhonePower last time. Alas, that was not to be. I connected the TA between the cable modem and router, only to find that the router couldn’t get to the Internet. Oh, well.
So I connected things using their alternative procedure, which puts the router between the modem and the TA. I also made sure to configure the router to put the IP address of the TA in the DMZ, which in theory is the same as a virtual direct connection to the cable modem. At first, everything appeared to work properly. I had dialtone and was able to dial. But all I could get when I dialed was a re-order tone (fast busy).
By that time it was late evening, so I just left things as they were and went to bed, hoping that everything would clear up overnight. That was not to be. This morning, I still had dialtone, but nothing else. So I power reset the TA, hoping that would allow it to reinitialize properly. That didn’t work, so I guess I’ll try resetting the whole network again to see if I can get service.
15:04 – I just got back from helping Barbara’s parents move to their new digs. Their TV and component audio system is now set up and working, along with two corded phones, an answering machine, and a cordless phone. The place is very nice. The dining room and other common areas are similar to those in a decent hotel. Their apartment is also nice, with a large living area, small kitchenette, two good-size bedrooms, and two full baths. The staff is friendly and helpful, and there are activities galore. I suspect Barbara’s parents are going to be a lot happier there than they were in their house. They’ll certainly be much less isolated. There are lots of elderly people around, and all of them seem friendly. The facility has a bus that makes regularly-scheduled runs to the supermarket, drugstore, Target/Wal*Mart, doctors’ offices, and so on. There’s maid service, and the dining room serves three full meals a day, with the main meal at noon. Barbara, Frances, and I had dinner there, and the food is quite good.
I left around 13:45 to come home. Colin is not used to having us both gone, but he was a good dog while I was gone. I arrived home just in time to walk him before a severe thunderstorm rolled in. That was fortunate, because unlike any of our other young BCs, Colin is afraid of thunder. All of the others have ignored thunderstorms, even quite loud ones, until they got to be eight or nine years old, when they suddenly decided that thunder was terrifying. Colin has been afraid of it since he was a pup.
I still haven’t gotten the PhonePower VoIP service working yet, and I’m about ready to give up on it for today.
15:59 – Our PhonePower VoIP service is now working properly. Fortunately, I decided to try just one more thing. The firmware in our D-Link DIR-615 router was about five years old. I visited the D-Link page and downloaded the most recent firmware, which is only about 4.5 years old. I held my breath, afraid I’d brick the router, and installed the firmware upgrade. That gave me what I needed: the ability to disable SIP in the Application Level Gateway. I disabled SIP, rebooted the router, and everything now works properly.
What a relief. It would have been embarrassing to have to call PhonePower tech support. When I created my account with them, one of the questions had a drop-down list where you could quantify how much you understood about this stuff. There were five choices. The first choice was basically for people who are completely ignorant. I first chose the final choice, which was basically “I know more about this stuff than you guys do.” I then reconsidered. That sounded a bit arrogant, although I have written books for O’Reilly about networking and TCP/IP and I did used to have primary technical responsibility for a digital phone network with 70 switches and several thousand stations. So I changed my selection to the fourth choice, which simply indicated that I knew quite a lot about this stuff. But having chosen even #4, it would have been mortifying for me to have to call tech support for help.
Now if only I could figure out how to delete voicemails on my cell phone. I need a teenager to help me, I guess. I’ve also been thinking about sending my first ever SMS.
16:08 – We really are living in a rain forest. That thunderstorm that just blew through here dumped another 3.2 inches (8.1 cm) of rain on us, and it’s still raining. That’s close to half a meter of rain in the last five weeks, or about 10 cm per week.