matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

A few years ago when we extended our house to create a new entrance hall we greatly enjoyed flicking through the relevant pages in Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”. So much of it rang true with those “oh yeah” moments as we looked with fresh eyes at the way we used our home. The book is also just a joy to read. I challenge anyone to read the Entrance Room pattern without smiling and nodding.

Some of the elements, such as the size of the hall, the need to create a defined threshold and reorienting the front door to improve the Intimacy Gradient, were baked into the building itself. Others were to be added by us after the builders had gone, and among this latter sort was the famous Waist-high Shelf pattern, often cited as an example of how Alexander’s system works.

We never got around to putting in that waist-high shelf, but the other day I noticed that a strange thing had happened. We’d taken a delivery of some flat-pack furniture. We were busy, so instead of getting assembled it just got dumped inside the front door. And at once it attracted papers, hats, a school sweatshirt - everything the waist-high shelf was meant to absorb.

So here’s the warning: Find room in your home for the waist-high shelf, or the waist-high shelf will find you, whether you like it or not.

“But daddy, if people didn’t have computers, how did they buy things from the internet?”

It’s amazing how something we’ve come to take for granted hangs from such a fragile thread.

As part of a new product trial for my employer, we recently had a visit from two very helpful telecoms engineers who checked out our broadband connection.

Living where we do within spitting distance of our local phone exchange, our broadband should have been blazing, but it turned out all those bits and bytes were struggling to be heard over the noise on the line. The engineers (who’d already proved they were a class act by taking off their boots at the door, without being asked) ran some checks, showed me some impressive looking waveforms and diagnosed a collision between the 19th and 21st centuries.

Back in the days when Crazy Frog was nothing but a proud native American Chief defending the plains of the Wild West (probably), Thomas Augustus Watson - of “Mr Watson, come here! I need you!” fame - had the bright idea of a bell to alert recipients to incoming calls. A bell. An actual bell. Not a Truetone, not even a Polyphonic. Just an actual, real, ringing bell. To make the bell ring, a pair of wires ran in parallel along the cable that carried the talking. When a call was coming in, power would surge down the lines and make the bell ring. Ingenious!

Fast forward about 120 years and even our cordless DECT phone has a choice of ten tinny tunes. If we could be bothered we could set the phone to play a different tinny tune depending on the caller. The bell wires in my home are pretty much redundant, but they’re still there, just in case I decide to plug in a phone with an actual, real, ringing bell.

And therein lay the problem, according to the engineer standing in my living room in his socks. Our phone had an old extension cable running upstairs. The two ringing wires from that extension were funnelling radio noise back into our phone system and drowning out the internet. Two minutes and a small screwdriver later the old extension cable had been disconnected and we were two megabits per second better off. Sorted.

Now attenuation is all that stands between me an broadband nirvana. Apparently.