thinkninja's Journal: POTS tomorrow

Hopefully a team of (orange :p) BT engineers will install a telephone line for me tomorrow. Gee, it's only been 3 weeks now...

In theory they won't need to rewire inside the house, merely run a line from the pole (which is about 8ft away, with the line passing directly over the roof) to the eave. That's because it's a converted outbuilding that had an extension running to it before. This seems like it should be a quick and simple procedure, but then it is being conducted by BT so...

* * *

/wishes that <HR> was allowed

I've written a shell script that acts as a simple bittorrent download manager (starting new downloads and stopping old ones). Here's a snippet:

# be a leech :/
 
  if ( grep "download succeeded!" /tmp/hardcopy.$i )
  then
  screen -S torrents -X eval "select $i" "stuff q"
  sleep 60
  screen -S torrents -X eval "select $i" "kill"
 
  for ((j=0;j<$screens;j++))
    do screen -S torrents -X eval "select $(($j +1))" "number $j"
  done
 
  fi

The second "select $i" is probably redundant but it's nice to make sure I don't kill the wrong window.

* * *

So, I'll be moving the this box back to my place and grabbing an old compaq p2-233 w/ 32mb for company. Pulled the cheap network card from the Athlon 800MHz. It doesn't seem to have a Linux driver (only an SCO Unix 5.0 driver) so I may have to get another card. I might be better off just building a cheap headless system then trying to resurrect this heap of junk.

These Shuttles look nice but a bit expensive. The damn bank is saying I can only withdraw 1/10th of my money, which is troubling. The balance sounds correct and I can't think of any debt that would wipe out the other 90% of my money. And, of course, you can't actually speak to a representitive over the phone...

update: Okay, now they're allowing me to withdraw my full balance. Good but wtf?

tomorrow: Well, according to Jon, who showed him in, the engineer has rewired the internals (one linebox) but has not joined it to the mainline. I'm now waiting on the pleasure of a 'jointer', a man qualified to climb a pole. Yeah, Maggie, that privitization idea really increased efficiency...