Coded green.

Thursday 3 October 2002

Portrait

Pic of the day: Thanks to the USB hub, I can take pictures like this while doing other things at the same time.

The greatness of USB

First off, I talked to Telenor about the missing ADSL equipment. After wading through a menu of speaking machines, and listening to some boy band music, I met a youngish sounding guy with west coast dialect. He did not ask me to repeat my name, which may be because they have caller ID and I called from home. (Sick today.) After I bemoaned the lack of a splitter, he checked and found that they had not even attempted to send me that package. He apologized and said they were terribly sorry (not that he sounded terribly sorry, then again neither did I) and explained that this happened now and then, it was a different department that for some reason did not always get the orders (or notice them, this part was a bit unclear).

After checking here and there, he promised the hardware was being sent immediately and I would have it tomorrow. I won't, of course, unless I'm sick again. I hope not. But if I get the slip in the mail tomorrow or even Saturday, I should be able to fetch it along with my groceries at the new post office. In this best case scenario, I should be able to use my telephone broadband sometime Saturday. Nifty.

Yes, my digestion is acting up today. Every time I went ready to go for the bus, I had to go to the bathroom instead. Highly conspicuous, but it worked on me. There is little to do once your intestines have made up their mind.

***

Onward to topic. I am hard pressed to imagine my day without the wonder that is Jensen USB hub. (USB = Universal Serial Bus, not to commute but for data traffic.) It has a cable that plugs into one of the two USB slots on my portable. Then there is this semi-transparent box with 4 USB slots. There is also a power supply, which I did not need on my desktop but which is necessary on my laptop. Now I can plug in the 250MB Zip drive, the camera, the trackball, and the cradle for synchronizing the pocket PC.

The selling point about USB is actually that you can just plug and play and then pull the plug, while the computer runs. It detects which remotes are plugged in and which not. So you don't really need a hub. There is not strictly any need to sync the pocket PC while you backup to the zip disk, for instance. Unless you're a Jennicam wannabe, you probably don't need to keep the camera plugged in at all times either. The trackball is rather indispensable, but then again there are 2 USB ports on the machine already.

It's about convenience. To be allowed to forget what units are connected or not, because they all are. And if you want to fetch an old but still legal MP3 from the zip drive while you're synchronizing the pocket PC, you can do that without breaking your flow.

From this weekend onward, however, it won't be just convenience; the ADSL interface is USB. With that and the trackball always plugged in, the rest of my equipment would just gather dust unless I had a hub. I guess I could log off the Net to take a picture, or not use the trackball while Cassie the Pocket PC downloaded Nova Notes for me to read on the bus. But luckily the hub exists. The question now is whether I should buy another one.


Yesterday <-- This month --> Tomorrow?
One year ago: This day sucked
Two years ago: Need cash?
Three years ago: Rebooting reality

Visit the Diary Farm for the older diaries I've put out to pasture.


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