Number 250 - March 2004

Ants in My Hub
by Paul Lujan Feb 2003 Bits & Bytes, Tampa Bay Computer Society Forwarded by Steve Bass, Pasadena IBM Users Group
And you thought you had problems....    Last night, I came home after a 4-1/2 hour drive back from Los Angeles (note to law enforcement officials: that's a "6" there, ...really), and sat down in front of the computer to check my mail. My connection was, for lack of a better word, s-s-s-slow. I looked at the hub to see if anyone else was having this problem. Nope, Mike and David's activity lights were busily flickering, so it was just me who was screwed. I reached down to fiddle with the connection, and noticed that the hub (as well as my hand, after the fiddling) was covered with ants. "That's odd," I thought to myself, "what would ants want with our hub?" But I was way too tired to deal with it at the time, so I went to sleep instead.    I wake up this morning and decide to investigate further. Yep, the hub is definitely swarming with ants. And, it doesn't look like the ants are just going to somewhere else, especially since there aren't any tasty ant treats anywhere nearby. They're clearly going into and coming out of the hub. Some of the ants going in are even carrying little white pellets. "Is that food?" I wonder. "Where is it coming from?"    I unplug the hub and pick it up, and kill all of the ants that come out. Then, I kill some more ants, some more ants, and some more ants. This goes on for a while. I begin to think that the little white pellets look an awful lot like eggs. I shake the hub, and it sounds like someone has poured a handful of coarse sand into it. "That's odd," I think to myself. "I don't recall this hub coming with a sand option."    I initially thought that there were just some ants there, but it became pretty clear that I have even more ants on my hands now. So, I decide to take a closer look at the hub. Unfortunately, the hub boasts a screwless construction, but I know that my screwdrivers can be used for more than merely removing screws, so I start prying. As I do so, a bunch of ants and eggs, as well as what look like larvae (basically, they look like slightly smaller-than-normal ants, but a are very pale brown instead of black) continue to fall out--into the sink, since I've become clever enough to do this over the sink.    Finally, I get the thing open and see a bunch of eggs lying on the circuit board, but fewer than I might have expected if there really was a colony set up there. So, I figure that they're probably under the circuit board. I got to work unscrewing the circuit board to take it out of the case.    Jackpot! That is, if my goal were to win an ant colony, which it wasn't. The entire bottom of the box is coated with eggs, and I see a	large ant, which I can only assume is the queen. I terminate the queen with extreme prejudice, then wash out the case (since it is made of metal, I figured it would be okay).    The circuit board, on the other hand, can't just be washed off-since I hold hopes of saving the hub, not really wanting to have to drop $30 on a new one-and there are lots of eggs wedged in small places, like between the link lights and between the chips connected to the ports, where they'd really be hard to get out of. So, I set the circuit board aside for the moment to take a shower.    When I come back, I notice that the ants had actually done me a favor! Suckers! In their futile attempts to save the colony, they picked up the eggs and scurried around like maniacs, solving my problem. I picked off the ants, and vigorously shook the board to try and dislodge anything still stuck in the ports. Much to my surprise, another queen falls out. (I've read that Argentine ants can have more than one queen per colony, but this is still a surprise, especially since I thought I had already gotten rid of almost everything.) I dispose of her, too, clean up the remaining ants, and figure that I might as well try putting the hub back together--not that I can completely undo my prying, but hey, it's cosmetic anyway.    Much to my surprise, it actually works! And my performance is back from miserable to normal--Ants 0, Me 1.    Man, I hate ants! If I could choose one genus to completely wipe off the face of the Earth, assuming that it wouldn't, like, destroy the ecosystem, it would be ants. But really, what depends on ants? Anteaters? Well, they're not doing a very good job, are they? Well, okay... I suppose I should probably choose something like mosquitoes, since they're less personally annoying to me, but they still have the whole large-scale, disease spreading thing going on. ..but, I'd expect some serious compensation from the WHO for not choosing ants!
Number 250 - March 2004