I AM SICK.

I woke up yesterday feeling slightly unwell, but not too bad. I even went out to a dinner party with taxlady, although I started having occasional coughing fits during the dinner.

By the time we got home my sinuses were acting up. Now that its the next 'morning', my head hurts, my throat aches and the whole nine yards. I'm wondering if this is the Martian Death Plague that prevented half the anticipation staff from Boston from attending our meetings. I'm suspecting that one of the Boston folks that DID attend may have given it me. In that case it has a 7 to 10 day incubation period, which is believable.

The worst part is that there's a bunch of stuff that I have planned to do next week. I have things I am supposed to be doing Tues, Wed, AND Thurs and now its all in jeopardy.

Serial Woes.

So, I haven't been able to get the serial IR receiver working on my PVR. It could be any one of a whole host of problems, and I'm trying to narrow things down. First off, I need to know that I'm A) programming the correct serial port (this machine has two, and I don't know which is which) and B) that the serial port I'm using actually works.

My plan was simple: I have an old external 2400-baud modem with auto-adaption capabilities so that if a serial port is even vaguely usable, I can talk to the modem and it can tell me what is up with the port. All I need is to connect it to the machine with an appropriate serial cable, and I'm good to go.

Well, that's my next problem. It seems that I no longer own a serial cable with a male 25-pin end on it. I do have some 25-pin to 9-pin adapters but they're all female-25 to male-9 where I need male-25 to male/female-9 to get things to work. With all the cables and adapters I have this should have been easy to come up with, but I'm surprised to find myself missing crucial bits.

So, before I go out and buy a serial cable adapter that I will only be using for a short time for diagnostic purposes, I thought that I would ask my friends list. So, does anyone have any old serial cables or adapters around that I could use to hook an old serial 25-pin DCE device (modem with female 25-pin connector) to a modern DTE (computer with 9-pin male connector) that I could borrow?