This past weekend, I was able to successfully install Windows Vista Beta 2 on my Mac with the help of Boot Camp. Now this is what I call dual-booting.
I hope you can excuse the mess — my blog’s temporary new purpose in life is to serve as a sandbox for my participation in the Movable Type 3.3 beta. Observations to follow at a later time once the beta’s feature set is a bit more fully built out.
We all had a grand time during a recent trip to the San Antonio Zoo. Deanna’s mom was visiting from New Hampshire — a perfect reason for a family excursion. To top it off, we rode the famous San Antonio Zoo Eagle train around Brackenridge Park and then made our way over to Pappasito’s for a much-needed fajita feast. What a day!
From Marcella Hazan’s recipe book, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.
It had been a mere month or two after having switched back to SBC when I purchased a DOCSIS 2.0-compliant Motorola cable modem during a late-night visit to Wal-Mart. The compliance with DOCSIS 2.0 was one of the hypothetical “missing links” that could bring about compatibility with ADT. And so it was that, after installing the new cable modem, I signed up for service with Vonage once again.
My new Vonage hardware arrived. I got everything hooked up and proceeded to disconnect our internal home phone wiring from the SBC landline. The phone service was working great. But my tests with ADT failed. Why? With the new cable modem, shouldn’t this problem have been solved? I decided to check the call log on my Vonage account page. Would I see evidence of my security system’s efforts to call the central office?
No such calls had been logged. And this suggested that the home security system was, for whatever reason, unable to pick up the phone line and so much as dial.
I opened up the security system control box. Wires twisted in all directions. I began moving phone pairs around, testing and patching to see where and how I could get a dial tone. I tested numerous scenarios in which the alarm system was explicitly connected to a working dial tone, yet still, the system failed to dial out during testing.
I went back to the Web. And this time, the shadows of confusion began to fade away. First, I was able to identify the name of the tiny patchboard inside the control box. Key fact: this thing was an RJ-31X. And it seemed to be at the center of my troubles.
Then, the eventual discovery of an obscure Web page, “How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home,” set me on the home track. As it turned out, the configuration of an RJ-31X was more sophisticated than I had initially understood. Because the alarm system needs the ability to perform a “line seize” when dialing out, the RJ-31X is doing more than just connecting the system to the internal phone loop. It’s connecting to that loop, and it’s connecting to the telco landline. It’s serving as a bridge between the two that can stop the flow of traffic at any given moment.
My newfound obscure Web page brought forth additional revelatory knowledge. In order to get VoIP to work with an RJ-31X jack, one must put the VoIP “telco” on its own line pair and let it hook into the RJ-31X from the other side of the gateway.
This was clearly, obviously, completely, very nearly almost making really good sense. I pulled the nearest phone jack out of the wall and I re-patched one of the two jacks to a brown pair. I plugged the VoIP router into that phone jack. Our home phones no longer worked. Good, exactly what I wanted. The plot had thickened.
I went to the outdoor telco demarcation point — the phone box attached to the side of our house. Wires, and more wires, were exploding in every direction from numerous CAT-5 cables. I sat there patching lines and testing. Identifying dial tone. Connecting one pair to another. Blue to brown. No, green to brown. No brown to black. No. Wait. And then repeating the same cycle inside at the security system control box. Green to yellow. No, green to green. No, brown to blue. Right.
Needless to say, this took awhile. But little by little, the code was being cracked. Piece by piece, the pieces were falling into place. And in the end, VoIP was routed to brown pair which was patched over to blue pair which made its way to the telco side of RJ-31X; internal wiring was routed to blue pair which was patched over to green pair which made its way to the internal side of RJ-31X.
The moment of truth had arrived. The home phones were working. Would ADT? Had civilization actually advanced?
Yes, it had.
We discovered — thanks to a wee-hours incident which involved an ear-shattering siren and fumbling around on an ADT keypad — that our home security system was unhappy. Very unhappy. It wasn’t able to phone home to the ADT central office for its routine checkup, and it wasn’t okay with that. So the security system proceeded to regularly chirp at us for the next several days while I tried to sort out how best to proceed.
I spoke with ADT. I chatted with Vonage. And, of course, I dug around on the Web for any semblance of helpful documentation. All pointed to my one final and certain doom: Security systems and VoIP don’t mix. You lose. Give up and get a “real” landline, they all told me.
I threw in my towel and signed up for SBC service again. We had tried. It had been a valiant effort to step into the brave new world of digital telephony. But it just hadn’t worked out for us.
A few weeks later, after SBC had flipped the switch and welcomed us back, I contacted Vonage to cancel our VoIP account. Oddly enough, I was assisted through the cancellation process by a savvy tech support agent. He began to ask questions about why we were leaving and threw around sophisticated terminology. And there I was — canceling service, and yet with hope rekindled. Could VoIP and ADT indeed live in harmony? But my number was back with SBC. Goodbye, Vonage. Perhaps some other day.
Switching back to SBC brought its own troubles. Lo and behold, the security system didn’t get well again. It continued to chirp and tests of the system failed. I called ADT to request service and they committed to send someone out, free of charge, to correct the issue. The local dispatch office, however, had its own understanding of how things would go. They were convinced that they would charge for the trip and any required parts and time. I found myself very much ready to break contract with ADT, but then I happened to mention the magic acronym: VoIP. “Oh, this problem came about after you used VoIP? I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding! Our visit will be free of charge.” Wow. Case closed. The ADT technician fixed the wiring.
And yet, once again, the relentless burden of the SBC bills started weighing on me. Once again I was handing over vast sums of money each month for services that I knew could be bought up on the cheap with VoIP. I couldn’t tolerate it. I knew that Alexander Graham Bell would have wanted me to innovate and beat the system and find a way to make VoIP and ADT talk to each other. After all, this is the twenty-first century.
It all began in April 2005 and seemed simple enough. I was through with paying the whopping phone bills from SBC each month for local service, long distance, and a few additional features such as voice mail and Caller ID. So I decided to make the plunge and try Digital Phone service from Time Warner Cable. A few weeks later, we were all hooked up, the call quality was great, our ADT home security system appeared to be handling the change well, and I was even paying Time Warner an extra few dollars each month for voice mail service.
But then the original, nagging question returned. Why pay Time Warner Cable the rates they were asking, plus extra for voice mail service, when I could switch to Vonage and get unlimited long distance, plus all the accompanying extras, for a mere $24.95 per month?
So I placed my order for Vonage service, got the hardware in the mail, hooked things up, and left Time Warner Cable in the dust.
All was well. VoIP was good. Service was cheap. And then it happened….
Adrian Hanft III of Colorado has made a great point about fonts:
You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane. And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser.
He goes on to outline five steps to font freedom. Not without controversy, perhaps his best thought is to see the classic type forms of history remastered by an open source digital typography project.
Alas, that still leaves us with the challenge of how to get those classic faces distributed to the world in an effective fashion. And then (dare I ask it) — would we like the appearance of the Web if the font floodgates were opened up? Is it perhaps the restraining effect of the limited number of universally-distributed typefaces that ensures some relative degree of readability and usability on the Web?
Here’s an odd fact for you: I’m fascinated by curling. And yes, I think it’s high time that curling came to balmy South Texas. I mean, what could be better than teams of four going head-to-head in a competition that involves strategic sliding of forty-pound polished stones, quarried in Scotland, down a long sheet of ice?
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