Dig long enough

And you might find gold.

Friday late afternoon or early evening, CreditLink lost contact with our credit reporting source. Big problem. I restored the data link, but we had garble. After digging in the source code for a bit, I discovered the serial port attributes. I set the port up for that and voila -- still garbled.

I dug some more. This is a part of the system in which we have gaps in the source code, too. sigh. I finally found one line that intrigued me enough to follow what seemed an unrelated issue. And there it was. A different set of serial port attributes.

Communications fully restored.

Then the phone system crashed. This has been a fabulously crappy holiday weekend. The only good thing to be said for it is: the office is air condidtioned.

Telco land lines

When you move from SBC land line telephones to a digital provider like Cox or TimeWarner, SBC will warn you several times that a power outage will stop your phone service preventing calls to 911.

I have called 911 exactly 0 times since it was created. I've called SBC several times over the years to report a phone outage.

I'm curious about the cell towers. Do they have a battery backup system? Or does the zone around a tower just go black?

And life's other mysteries.....