On stretching my comfort zone

My new job is going well.  It took about 2 months, but my Director did find something to stretch my comfort zone last month, which he jokingly referred to as a “poisoned chalice”.  Based on how well I handled that, he took me for coffee earlier this week and outlined “Project Poisoned Chalice II”, which is the sort of project I was expecting after a couple of years with the company, not a couple of months! While initially somewhat thrown by it, a couple of days on, I’m feeling quite excited by the whole thing.

Firstly, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”  I’m choosing to believe that I can do this.  Therefore, whether it’s possible or not is no longer in doubt, and the question becomes “How do I do that?”.  And figuring that out is one area in which I excel!  I can see the broad outline – I know what I’m trying to build – so everything from here on is figuring out what materials and tools I need, and how to combine them.  Logistics and creativity and logical steps are my bread-and-butter.  Sure, I’m going to need to learn how to use some new tools, and I’ll probably have to figure out how the claw side of a hammerhead works as well as the hammer side,  but there’s manuals for that.  To whit, I have just bought a couple of books related to the work I’m now supposed to be doing, and just need to find the time to gut them for info.

Using another conceptualisation, I can liken this to the Obeng project type “Going on a Quest” where what is to be done is clear, but how it is to be done is not, and the “business” is trying to do something it hasn’t done before.  Given the content of this particular project, I’d like to see it move within a couple of cycles into “Painting by Numbers”.  What’s we’re doing is new to us, but not novel in the wider world.  This, of course, makes it easier because there are techniques and pitfalls and the like documented...somewhere.  (The projects that spin off this one, however, will fall into any or all of the project types, and will need handling appropriately.  So the one I’m currently focussing on is a meta-project, if you will, which will define the actual projects to be done to impact our bottom line.)  Oooh! Metaphor alert!  We are indeed Questing at this stage, but not for the answers.  We’re Questing for the right set of tools and techniques for this company in this situation to enable us to produce The Plan.  And once we have the answers, we can see the spin-off/subsidiary projects, and can tackle them by whatever means are necessary.

Since my best workshops are those with an extended metaphor to make them somewhat more fun than your average Corporate Re-Engineering Day, in my head this combines with my Dungeons & Dragons hobby to become:

Phase I – map the dungeon we’re in, recruit allies/party members, find where the treasure is and slay any monsters between us and the goodies (do research! of everything! find mentors!)

Phase II – identify the treasure (Magic item? Non-magical weapon? Vorpal sword? Healing potion? etc) and figure out what’s useful in this context right now, what should be stored for the future, and what can be discarded

Phase III – Use the treasure to escape from the dungeon (aka complete Poisoned Chalice II by finishing the meta-project)

On-going maintenance – every 6-12 months do another dungeon sweep to update the meta-project and see if there’s anything else to be learned or slain that’s popped up while we weren’t looking.

Phases I and II are my research and prep stages, while Phase III is the most visible aspect of the project to everyone else.  Of course, I may need to make this somewhat that less geeky before using it in my office...

Home networking for Dummies

I have a BT phone line. Into this is plugged a microfilter, allowing me to have both a telephone line and a broadband connection. The phone line plugs into a cordless phone base station. The broadband (DSL) line plugs into a router. The router transmits wirelessly so that our smart phones and laptops can connect. So far, so good.

Sadly, someone else has been connecting to the wireless, having broken the key used to secure it and is costing me money in excess bandwidth every month. So I have a new (to me, it's actually secondhand from a trusted source) router, which has several snazzier security features which should stop the bandwidth thief. It should be simple to swap them over: 1) note down the username and password for the broadband connection; 2) unplug the old router; 3) plug the new one in; 4) connect it by ethernet cable to my laptop; 5) type in the username and password; 6) tell my laptop and phone about the new wireless network and password; and 7) off we go.

Oh, no. Oh, no we don't, not by a long shot.

Steps 1 through 4 worked fine. Step 5, however, failed miserably. I tried three different approaches to the router configuration settings, and it resolutely denied there was an internet connection to configure. Huh? So I tried to ring my internet provider to ask what was going on. I dialled the number, the DTMF (tone dialling) played a merry tune and I waited. And waited. Rang off, tried again. Nothing apart from a gentle hiss. Ring the number from my mobile, connected straight away. By this time, however, I've realised it's not my broadband provider that's the problem - or at least, not the first problem I need to fix - it's the phone line. Or lack of one.

There's a model of networking which goes something like this - it's a while since I've had to use it in anger. I've been stepping through it layer by layer trying to identify the problem(s) I have:
Physical layer (cables, sockets)
Data Layer (zeros and ones transmitted over physical layer)
Network layer (slightly higher level addressing, eg MAC addresses?)
Transport layer (TCP/IP - the mechanisms of getting the bits to your computer in the right sequence)
Session layer (linking the bits together properly)
Presentation layer (layout and making things look nice)
Application layer (doing stuff - the layer the user actually interacts with most of the time).

(You can remember it with the mnemonic Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away.)

Each layer relies on the one before to work. I can't influence the S, P and A layers, and they rely on the T and N layers, which are the ones you usually worry about when setting up a network connection. These, in turn, rely on the D and P layers. It seems that it's my Physical layer that's the problem. All the components are plugged in, and the router will talk to my laptop all the way up to the Application layer. However, it won't talk to the microfilter, and somehow breaks the phone line's Physical connection too. If you think of the router as a barrier, all communications are fine INSIDE the barrier. The internet continues to work OUTSIDE the barrier, but messages aren't getting through the barrier like they should. To confirm this is the problem, I did the following:

Unplug router from microfilter. Pick up phone, get dial tone. So far, so good. Replace phone. Plug old router in to microfilter. Pick up phone, get dial tone. Okkayyy... Replace phone. Plug in new router to microfilter. Pick up phone. Get no dial tone.

Interesting. In the sense of the Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."

Pull the sofa away from the wall. Remove the faceplate. Ooooh, that doesn't look like it should:



On the back of the faceplate, not connected to anything, is this:



I've put that lot back together, and asked around on Facebook for advice as well as briefly googled the router model. It's probably that my BT line has a rubbish signal-to-noise ratio and the router can't handle that. I'm going to try to get the router plugged into a friend's network at the weekend to confirm that the router is A-OK, then assuming it is, call BT and ask them what they can do to clean up my phone line.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I hate doing anything with technology. It's not quite black magic, in as much as I understand the principles of how it should work. It is, however, not simple. And I like things to be simple, especially when they're built on logic, and should thus work as predicted.