It's amazing how quickly the weather can change from hot and muggy to brisk and cold in a day! Two days ago we still had the A/C on, then we had one day of the windows being open, and today we started off by turning the heat on. Around the third week in October things are always somewhat unpredictable, and this year is no exception. But my wife and I agreed that fall is finally upon us.
I am starting to think about winter hobbies. I just got the latest version of my video editing program (Adobe Premiere Elements V4) and I am looking forward to exploring its new features. I have a lot of backed-up video work to do, especially because I have been spending most of my time lately campaigning. Speaking of which; we vote on November 6, and it is important that everybody get out and vote, no matter who your choice of candidate is. The voter turnout on Oak Island (for example) in the last election was only 41% - less than one in two people voted. Come on - we can do better!
I was called to a problem at a client's home recently that merits a paragraph or two here. I am giving it some attention because it underscores the difference between "traditional" home electronics and the newer digital world. The problem was that my client had recently upgraded from a traditional phone service to the Time Warner digital service and now his FAX machine didn't work.
I started checking the FAX out and noticed that there was no dial tone being detected when we tried to send a FAX. In these cases I usually start with the most common problem - the phone cord itself. It might not have been correctly plugged into the FAX machine (there are often two phone backs on a multi-function FAX / printer / copier machine, and you usually have to have the phone line plugged into the correct one. Nope, that was OK.
I then used my trusty fingers to feel down the phone cable to see where it went. Interesting - the other end wasn't plugged in! I asked my client, and he indicated that he used to have two phone lines coming in - one dedicated to FAX. But when he got the TW service he only got one line as he was now using on of those Internet-based FAX services to receive FAXes and only using the FAX unit to send. In order to get around the fact that he now only had one phone line, he was just unplugging the telephone's cord at the wall and plugging in the FAX cord when he wanted to send a FAX. And here is where the failure was.
In the old world, your phone service came in from outside the house and was wired directly to all the phone line jacks in the house. You could plug a telephone (or FAX) to any jack inside the house. But in the new world, the phone service was coming in through the TV cable to a cable modem that was for both Internet and phone use. The phone cord from the modem to the wall jack was now carrying the phone signal TO the wall, not from it. In other words, all the rest of the phone jacks in the house were getting the signal from the one phone jack near the modem.
What my client had done was to unplug the cable from the modem at the wall, and plugged in the FAX. But doing that removed the phone signal, as he had removed the cord from the modem that brought the signal to the rest of the house. And so, no dial tone, of course. If he had plugged the FAX into any other jack in the house, all would have been fine. But since all the equipment was in the computer room, the one jack he used was the critical one.
The fix was actually easy. All that was needed was a standard two line splitter that plugs into a standard phone jack. Normally they work by splitting a signal at the wall jack into two or three jacks on the front, allowing more than one phone device to be plugged in. Even though in this case the input was at the front rather than the back, it still worked OK because inside those splitters all the connections are just wired together anyhow.
So, another mystery cleared up!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)