Monthly Archives: April 2004

buzzword compliance

I Are A Network Engineer

So, it's a sad state of affairs when you have a network outage because of the way your kids put things away. But that's what happened in our basement family room, where the kids shoved so much crap onto shelves that it pulled down my homemade wire run. That, in turn, put just enough strain on the terminals in one RJ-45 jack in my wiring closet – slash – network hub rack – slash – WAN equipment area (the place where my hub, router, and cable modem live) to cause a pair of wires to touch, creating an interesting cross-talk problem that took me a while to track down.

Apparently, that was all it took to push a 10-year old pocket hub that had been holding together my second-floor segment of the household LAN to decide its time had come, and it crapped out completely. It seems it was for the best anyway–my network speed has improved radically, so I suspect the hub was causing some latency or collision problems that I had never noticed. Hasta la vista, hublet.

Meanwhile, for a week, my sons had no Internet access while I tried to find the time to isolate the wiring problem and fix it. Tonight, I found the offending wiring block and re-did the punchdowns; within minutes, they were watching the new Harry Potter trailer.

Yet another reason to go totally wireless in our house, I suppose. But if we did that, all my 10Base-T skills would go to waste…

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Family, politics

State of Grace

This morning's news featured a discussion of the “Kerry Communion Scandal” — John Kerry, who is divorced, apparently took communion at the Catholic Easter mass he attended this weekend, sending the Opus Dei set into a tizzy.

The only difference in this regard between me and John Kerry is that my first marriage was annulled by the Catholic church (because it was officiated by a Methodist Navy chaplain, and not a priest) and my ex never got around to the details required to get our marriage blessed before she fell in love with the assoicate pastor and… well, there's a novel in that story. So, even though I have two children from that marriage, I get a Catholic “do-over.”

Kerry apparently doesn't rate one, and in the eyes of some he therefore is not in a “state of grace”–and should therefore be refused communion, or have the common sense to stay seated while the queue forms. Others tut-tut, but say that it's up to the individual to determine whether he or she is in a “state of grace.”

Forget if a politician could *ever* be in a state of grace, by definition. What ever happened to, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?” Oh, I forgot, this is the juncture of politics and religion, where the first stone is cast in order to appear to be without sin.

And you'd better be casting a stone if it's a Sunday, because the Pope just told Australian bishops that all secular activities should be avoided on the sabbath–so throwing a baseball on the sabbath is a sure path to Purgatory. Get your indulgence payments ready.

I spent Easter morning in church with my wife, children, and (erk) ex. She came in cursing her father and sister over how he had given her the furniture out of his condo that he had just sold, fuming over how he had never asked HER if she wanted any of it, and how her sister had slighted her in so many ways over the weekend. She then took communion. Was she in a state of grace when she did so, still muttering words of hate under her breath?

When so-called Christians shower hate upon people who are different from them, are they in a state of grace? When we sit by as a country and let our leaders send our brothers, sisters, and children off to kill on a whim, can any of us be in a state of grace?

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