I’m not sure what happened. It was time to leave work, so I un-cradled my HTC TyTN II phone. I noticed it was part-way through synching but that shouldn’t matter.

I walked out to the bus-stop and waited, and waited, and waited. I had a meeting in the City and when the bus arrived eventually I realised I’d be late, so I went to try and ring ahead.

The phone was stuck.

I did a soft-reset, and after it restarted it got as far as saying it couldn’t do a network connection (not sure why it was trying to do that), and then it would refuse to do anything else.

Further soft-resets didn’t help either. Narelle tried to ring me, but I couldn’t even answer her call, as none of the buttons had any effect, and the only way I could stop it ringing was to soft-reset it again.

I finally got home, and was able to look up the manual online. For future reference, to do a hard-reset:

1. Press and hold the left SOFT KEY and the right SOFT KEY, and at the same time, use the stylus to press the RESET button at the bottom of your device.
2. Release the stylus, but continue pressing the two SOFT KEYs until you see a special message on the screen.
3. Release the two SOFT KEYs, and then press the button on your device.

That seems to have done the trick, though it does mean I’ll have to re-install everything else again.

Here’s something a bit different!

We’re having a few people over for Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday. If you know me, then you are welcome to join us. Just drop me an email and I’ll forward you the details.

I’d been thinking over the weekend that it would be polite to contact Paul Sherlock - the Director of UniSA’s ISTS to let him know that I’m not planning to move over to their new Learning and Teaching Systems team. However, he beat me to it! He rang to ask if he could drop by and have a chat. Paul has always been friendly and cordial when I’ve had anything to do with him previously, and today was no different.

I told him that I was planning to leave UniSA, and not move out to the new position at Mawson Lakes. I’ve already mentioned here previously that the way I see ISTS function is not a place that I see myself fitting into.

He asked about my plans for the future, and also enquired about handover plans.

Handover won’t be easy, as the new team doesn’t exist yet, and I’d guess it would be at least another month by the time they advertise and fill the other positions. The best I can do is try and get RJ up to speed on as many things as I can think of (as he’s indicated interest in the new team), and maybe make use of that nice Wiki software we now have.

It isn’t easy picking up other people’s work. I experienced this first hand when Roger left our team last year. Picking up after me will be harder, as I’ve got 13 years of “legacy” applications behind me :-)

The meeting ended positively, with Paul wishing me well for the future. I appreciate that. You never know when your paths will cross again, so I think it’s preferable to leave on good terms.

This afternoon, there’s a meeting of all staff from the Flexible Learning Centre to discuss the plan for restructuring the unit. If there are no major stumbling blocks then the final plan will be published next week and the changes will start after that.

If there’s been one positive thing to come out of this whole “managing change” process, I think it has brought us closer together as a team (specifically the Online Services and IT teams). We’ve been having more lunches, morning teas, and spontaneous chats about how we are going. As well as wanting to know colleague’s plans for the future, I sense there’s also a bit more caring going on - making sure people are ok (or as ok as you can be).

Unfortunately for me, I’ve ended up missing most of this week being sick with a really nasty throat infection. It was good enough that the Doctor decided antibiotics might be helpful. One strange side-effect of being sick at home for a few days is I now have Justine Clarke’s “Watermelon” song running around in my head, due to watching too much ABC Kids TV programmes :-)

Dad finally took the plunge a few weeks ago and signed up with Adam Internet to get ADSL2+. They’ve had dialup for years, and I think Mum will really appreciate the extra speed as she does a lot of family history searches online. I would have recommended Internode (which is who I use), but Adam’s cheaper plans couldn’t be argued with.

Provisioning only took a few days, and fortunately for them I had a spare Netgear DG834Gv2 modem that they could use. I’d bought it a few years ago to help out my brother-inlaw connect two machines in his house wirelessly (it was configured as an access point, as they had problems getting the individual wireless cards to talk to each other directly). When my brother-inlaw got broadband he got his own modem, so I got mine back.

The new connection came up fine, but only at 3Mbit which was a lot slower than I was expecting (they’re only about 2.2km from the exchange). They also noticed their voice calls were a bit noisier.

So Saturday I spend most of the day crawling around inside their ceiling installing a new Cat5 cable (from MIMP) to run from an Advanced Circuits 921E2+ central splitter (from MATS Systems - I bought a C10100E from them, but Mark says the 921E2+ is even better) out to the back room where the modem and computer are.

The trickiest thing (apart from all the physical gymnastics of navigating 195cm/6’ 5” body a around the ceiling space) was pulling the cable down the gyprock wall cavity. After several failed attempts trying to drop a weighted string down, we realised there was enough slack in the existing phone cable that we could use that to pull a string back up the wall, then pull the Cat5 cable back down again.

The good news is that their speed as jumped up to 8Mbit! I’ll have to check to see if they think the voice quality has improved at all.

We noticed that the little junction box (official name “Network Termination Device”) mounted on the fascia is missing its cover (possibly broken when some maintenance was done to the electricity wire not so long ago). I suspect if Telstra repaired or replaced this, it could bump them up a bit higher still.