Well, after test driving the new Convertible Beetle (and loving it), I find out that not only does it NOT come in the color I wanted (platinum gray), but the only one trimmed the way I wanted in the state of Texas was the ORANGE one I test drove. Ugh.

So I drove a Blue Lagoon Hard Top with Sunroof, leather, 1.8L Turbo engine, etc., etc., and decided it was the way to go. Of course, the fact that it was about 8 GRAND cheaper didn’t sour the deal!

I pick it up on Monday (after they’ve cleaned it up, installed the CD player and filled the tank with gas). I’ll post pictures once I’ve got it home. Too bad I have to go out of town for a week right after I get it…

I just got confirmation via email that my iTrip has shipped! Unfortunately, it’ll probably arrive Monday afternoon, and I get on a plane Monday around lunch. Guess I’ll have to wait until next weekend to play with it.

Sometimes, it’s just too aggravating. Only one day after the third largest tax cut bill in history has been signed into law, the Libs note that the $400/child tax credit increase doesn’t apply to some segments of low-income families. Using the tired, old class warfare rhetoric, they point out how the tax cuts are only for the “rich” (i.e. those that make more than $24,000 a year). And, true to form, CNN rushes to their side showing their liberal slant on things with this story. Sometimes it’s just too obvious.

Note that in a 22-odd paragraph story, it takes them until paragraph 18 (way past what the average reader is going to read) to point out that

…most families in this income bracket also do not pay federal income taxes and benefit from other tax breaks geared to low-income families.

Get that? The people they’re moaning about not getting this credit don’t pay ANY federal income tax at all. So, what, we’re just supposed to give them money back, too? Sorry, but that’s what’s known as income redistribution. And that leads to socialism. But, then again, that’s what the Libs generally want.

Don’t forget, there’s more multi-millionaire liberal democrats in office than anyone else. If you think they’re only looking out for the little guy, you’re just fooling yourself. They only want you to think that because it keeps them in power. But the country is wising up to that schtick.

Ugh. The holiday on Monday gave us a short week, unfortunately the amount of work to get done in that week didn’t shorten to match. I’ll be out of town in Phoenix all next week (learning about Lotus’ Learning Management System, whatever that is), so I’ve got to get a number of things wrapped up by tomorrow. Oof.

It just dawned on me why MT wasn’t creating the individual archive pages (doh! moment)… it’s working now.

Excellent. TiVo is working with Apple to bring AAC compatibility to it’s Home Media option. This will make music purchased at the iTunes music store accessible to the home theater via the TiVo Series 2 DVR.

Of course, I still haven’t purchased a song from the iTMS…

This site is extremely cool. The idea of a completely CSS controlled visual design is very alluring; I hope to learn a few things there and come back to implement here.

Yes, I know, archives aren’t working properly. For some reason, MovableType is not creating the right links and file names. I’m looking into it (as I have the time).

Go back and look at that last entry again; specifically the post time. 1:10 AM. As in the morning. More directly, the middle of the night. The time when most sane people are at home, at least, if not already experiencing REM sleep. For Cynthia and me, that’s when we walked in from our little adventure last night.

It all started when I noticed the servers at the office were (once again) inaccessible from the house. On the way to lunch, Cynthia and I ran by the office so I could see if it was another power outage problem, and kickstart the servers. Well, we got there and all was well as far as the servers were concerned. But the router was showing an alarm light on the WIC for the T-1. I took a look at the smart jack for the T-1 and noticed that it looked completely dead. Great.

I decided to call Allegiance to open a call and noticed something else was wrong: no dial tone from the phone switch. Things just kept getting better. Not only was my digital circuit down, but the analog lines to the phone system were not getting dial-tone either.

I called Allegiance on my cell phone and told them what I had discovered, and then rebooted the router and reseated the card in the smart jack (again), all to no avail. They said they’d start researching the problem and let me know what they found.

An hour or so later they called to say they’d have to dispatch Bell to work the problem from the telco side, and asked if I’d be available should they decide they needed in the building. I said sure.

They decided they needed access around 9:00 last night. Thinking there wouldn’t be much they could do on-site (I was still convinced at this point that it was something between the Central Office and our building), Cynthia and I hopped in the bug and headed up to the office. Couldn’t take more than an hour, right? Wrong.

Mr. Bell Guy (actually his name was Matthew) checked out the equipment in my server room and came to the same conclusion that I had: problem’s not there. However, he did a line trace on my circuit coming into my demarc and discovered that I had an open pair about 50 feet from the 66-block. That’s not good at all. But things were just starting to get fun.

Now, up until this point I didn’t know much about how the building was wired. However, most buildings have a main telco room in the basement, or, in cases like our building where there is no basement, on the first floor. Unfortunately, all the doors were locked.

Not willing to let this sit until Tuesday (holiday weekend and all), I called the emergency number listed on the front door of the building. I explained to the security person what was up, and he took my information and said he’d contact the building manager. Apparently he talked to her, she called the main building maintenance person, he called the security company back and they notified me that they were dispatching a security guard from the building across the street that was also managed by the same company that manages our building. Ten minutes later Mr. Security Guard (actually his name was David, and he looked about 20) shows up with a master key.

We proceed to get him to unlock the telco room on the first floor. Matthew (Mr. Bell Guy) sees that there’s no fiber mux cabinet in the room and says that it must be somewhere else in the building, perhaps on a different floor. Since my suite is on the 4th floor, we deduce that it’s probably there. We head up the stairs to 4, locate the telco room (that I didn’t know existed before this point) and guess what? It’s already unlocked.

We do indeed find a fiber mux cabinet in this room, so, thinking we’ve struck paydirt, we send David (Mr. Security Guy) on his way, thanking him profusely. Of course, the plot thickens here.

Matthew opens the cabinet, and starts looking for the repeater to our circuit. Our smart jack is of the “pairgain” variety, not a conventional T-1 smart jack. According to the system engineering notes from Bell, our circuit terminates on shelf 1 slot 6 of the mux cabinet. Well, lo and behold, there’s not a pairgain card in that slot, but a conventional one. That can’t be right because those two types of cards don’t talk to each other.

Matthew gets on the horn with the Central Office, who patches Sonnet in to loopback the line and try to identify the card. No dice. As he does this he’s tracing wires from the 66 punchdowns to see if he can find where they terminate in the cabinet. He notices that they seem to go to house copper, not to the cabinet, which is very strange and doesn’t match what Bell has on record for us. Meanwhile, I put a fox and hound on the copper pair from our demarc and try to trace them back to the telco room to see if we meet up. When I come back to the telco room after putting the tone generator on our 66 block, I can’t find the tone in the room at all.

At this point it still hasn’t hit us what’s going on, so we continue to trace the problem from the telco side. We go back down to the first floor to check this “house copper” and see that it’s jumpered over to a circuit that says it goes to a cabinet on the second floor. Very strange, but at least it was labeled. Unfortunately, Mr. Security Guy is gone and the telco room on the second floor is locked.

Again, not willing to give up at this point, I try to call back the number of the security guard, only to find it was the main number for the building across the street, and of course the switchboard is on auto-attendant for the holiday weekend. Argh. So, I head across the street to see if I can get in the building and get security to let us in the second floor room. Well, they’ve had a shift change since the first time, so I have to explain the whole scenario again. Luckily, the previous shift left some notes so they knew I wasn’t just some kook off the street, and sent a new person, Ms. Security Gal (didn’t catch her name) over with the magic key.

Presto, we’re into the second floor telco room, and there is a cabinet there. The right one, this time. Matthew locates our repeater card, it looks fine. Trouble’s not there. Great.

We head back up to 4 to work the problem from the telco room towards my demarc. Now it’s dawning on us what might actually be the case. There’s a new tenant moving into the space adjacent to ours and there’s fresh construction. We get a ladder and start tracing 25-pair from the telco room towards our suite in the ceiling. At the wall separating our suites we find the problem. Some idiot contractor doing cabling for the new tenant decided that this nice 25-pair cable sitting in the ceiling wasn’t his, so he decides to cut it. Not cut it and pull it out, not cut it and pull it back, just cut it. Ugh.

Sure enough, we turn the tracer on and find tone on both sides of the cut (we have tone generators on each end at this point). That’s it. We strip the cable back and start the process of splicing 25 pairs (that’s 50 individual wires) to repair the damage. That takes about an hour.

Analog service comes back. I reset the router and the T-1 comes back up. I make sure I can get pings out and all looks good. We close everything up and head home. Allegiance calls me about the time I’m walking out of the building and notes that everything looks good on their end. I thank them and close the ticket.

So, how did you spend your Sunday evening this fine holiday weekend?

Cynthia did finish her book, though.

Can you say cable cut?