Month: March 2017

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Ahh, accomplished goals… some unintentional.

Sleeping late

Slept a little late this morning.  That was nice and needed!

Got up, had coffee, read a little, then started cleaning the apartment. I’d worked my way to the bathroom, where in preparation for my shower I stripped then decided that I’d clean the bathroom before I showered. While I was busy scrubbing the toilet, sink and tub, maintenance apparently knocked.

Nude Yoga For Men On the Rise 733x440I didn’t hear them, so thinking I was still alone I walk out of the bathroom into the shocked and clearly embarrassed maintenance guys. Both young, the taller one stammered and turned beet red. The shorter one looked away, obviously very uncomfortable. My hands were full of cleaning supplies and a wet sponge.

Prld xlgThe taller one was looking at me trying very hard to figure out what to do

I remembered something I’d read once “What has been seen can’t be unseen.” After a brief pause, I just kept walking toward the kitchen to put the supplies away. I rinsed my hands then walked back to the bedroom and pulled a pair of sweats on.

Both the of the guys relaxed visibly and I smiled, “How can I help you?“

“Um, we just needed some building samples, there’s going to be some renovations and we needed to get materials so we can match the original construction.”

Cleaning apartmentThe tall one was shuffling uncomfortably.

I was thinking, “These poor men, never had to change clothes with other boys or men in school.”

“Oh well don’t let me hold you up, I’m going to finish wiping down the bright work. Let me know when you’re done.“

I went back to the bathroom after grabbing a microfiber cloth from the linen closet and polished the faucets. After a few minutes, I head them saying goodby and locking the door behind them.

Then I took a shower

Laundry

Apartment cleaned, dirty clothes in the bag, and down the stair to load up the car. Then I get the 3 hour drive to the mountains. Ugh, what a cluster f*&K the drive has become. The I-15 is a wide ribbon of concrete that is always bumper to bumper, with traffic that doesn’t have any reason to be bumper to bumper. People just refuse to drive according the rules. You know, little things like signaling, slower traffic to the right… The rules that are supposed to make the freeways MOVE freely, which is why they’re called FREEWAYS.

Anyway, made it to the mountain.

Solar lightingFixed the solar lights that had been damaged by the weather and the other half driving over them. Down to the last of those units, which means it’s time to lay in another supply.  While I was at it, I did some of the yard work, mostly pruning and cleaning up the perennial beds. There’s a lot of work that I’ll need to do, but it doesn’t all have to be done in the next 24 hours.

Took the dog for a walk and now he’s happily sleeping on his cushion.

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It Never Fails…

I’d been asleep for an hour last night. That in itself is a feat, with all the people wandering around on a Friday night, (weekends sleeping here is a tough thing) when I woke to the sound of something… my head registered it as a car coughing a few times while trying to start, then there were two loud BOOMS. 
I knew that sound. That was the sound of a gun. 

My guess is that it was something over a .40 caliber but couldn’t be more specific. It was close, too close. I rolled out of bed onto the floor and waited to see if there were more to come.

In the 5 to 10 seconds of silence that followed I wondered what the hell was going on. A minute later when I heard doors slamming all around the apartment complex I cautiously got up from the floor. I padded quietly to the nearest window and peered out. All the while thinking I was acting like an old person.

I could hear other occupants of the complex shouting and talking outside.

After a few minutes the sirens started and familiar blue & red lights were playing across the walls of my apartment. More people were joining the growing babble in the parking lot and on the sidewalks downstairs.

I decided to stay out of it, and went back to bed. Lying in bed with the strobing lights adding to the already too bright “Security Lights” shining on the walls through the window blinds, I realized I wasn’t going to get back to sleep anytime soon.

Car alarms started going off and I was out of bed again. 

The car alarms probably went off because someone leaned against or bumped some of the cars in the parking lot. 

Ok, time to go to the head. In the bathroom next door, the guy who lives there is taking a leak and talking on the phone. 

I wonder if he knows that I can hear every word he says in his bathroom? I can tell you his bathroom is the scene of an enviable amount of sex or a less enviable amount of masturbation, complete with some rather filthy dialog.

Anyhow, he’s on the phone talking to someone about the shooting and says, “There are cops everywhere, yeah I’ll be right over.” He didn’t, as far as I can tell come home last night. I’m guessing he probably took the opportunity to sully someone else’s bathroom.

I know I’m not going to get to sleep until all this dies down. I go to the cabinet and make myself a stiff drink. It’s 10:40 PM.

By 1:00 AM folks have gotten bored with their conversations in the parking lot and are finally returning to their apartments with all the attendant door slamming. 

I have to get up in 2 hours to go to work. If I wasn’t expected to be nice and patient on the phone I could actually work on that amount of sleep.

But as I consider it and weigh that I’m supposed to be empathetic to a substantial number of pathetic, perpetual, “victims”, I decide I’m not going to go in to work. 

Don’t get me wrong, I do talk to some really nice people, the problem is that they are in the minority and a larger number of people I talk to are the self appointed “Victim” class.

Yeah, they have a disease. Yeah, it sucks, but I personally know many people with the same disease and they’re not “Victims” they deal with it and get on with their lives. 

They’re good folks and their disease, like their sexuality or color of their skin simply IS. Their examples are in part why I thought working for this company would work for me. It never occurred to me that there might be a large percentage of the “Victim, Poor Me, Give me whatever I want” group. 

My bad, I know human nature better than that. Somehow I thought that a life threatening illness would galvanize them to be better people. Ah well, lesson learned. It has made me appreciate the people I know who are better people more.

I’ll read about the gunshots in the morning. Whoever did whatever, is of no consequence to me. But I am not going in to work. I just can’t muster even a simulation of empathy for the constant barrage of whiny people. 

As I lay there in the prison-like, lighting seeping through the window shades. I consider that my lease is coming to an end in June. If I don’t find another job by then I’m thinking I’ll at least find a new apartment. One hopefully that doesn’t have Shoji screen thin walls.

Finally I sleep…

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Gee, it’s nice to have internet.

Finally, here in the mountains we have real internet.

When I first moved here, we could only have dialup. That was actually OK because most business was being done on phones that were hardwired, and most documents were Faxed. 

Verizon

Then DSL came to town but the phone company wasn’t investing in maintenance or expansion. DSL worked pretty well for a number of years and really only presented problems when software manufacturers switched to download delivery. 

It could take 12 hours to download operating system updates. 

As the DSL connection degraded, the download times got longer. Eventually the DSL speeds we were seeing from Verizon were on par with the old dialup speeds. Sadly it wasn’t uncommon for my 4G connection via my cellphone to be faster.

Finally the DSL became unusable and Verizon’s “Tech People” told us the problem was our router, refusing to acknowledge the problem was in the phone lines.

Hughes net gen4 satellite internet

In desperation we switched to HughesNet Satellite. We didn’t change our router, and it worked fine at first.

Overall it is a very expensive solution and it’s fraught with issues. Forget using WiFi calling, we never were able to use Skype, or FaceTime, over the Satellite Link. We could however use those services occasionally on the 4G cell phones as long as we didn’t move very much.  

Satellite degraded over time too. Eventually we couldn’t stream music, or video, and we had to deal with datacaps on how much we could download in a month.

In the course of time I switched to a new router. While that expanded my WiFi range and sped up my internal network connections, it did nothing to correct the issue with satellite. 

To be fair, In general the service worked… just not as advertised, those snazzy commercials with grandparents watching their grandchildren’s recital? Oh Hell no!

5

Grandma & Grandpa would be eating cheap dry cat food to pay that bill as they ran through their datacap, and clicked on “Add Data”.

In the end HughesNet became unusable for anything other than email and some web browsing, if you were willing to wait for the pages to load.

I didn’t bother trying to download software updates, preferring to wait until I got to a place with cable modem connectivity.

The same became true of the other half, all software updates were done away from home in the workplace.

160111075230 attt direct tv 540x304

Add the cost of Satellite TV which was ever increasing, and well at some point the price vs. benefit of the service(s) becomes untenable.

We’d been hearing rumors about a Fiber Service coming to town. They have in fact come to most of the town but after a year of waiting for them to get to our area they still haven’t gotten here.

Then we heard that Spectrum Cable was up here with HD TV and internet. Turns out that the price was 1/3 what we were paying for DirecTV and HughsNet.

So boom! We now have a nice little cable modem running in place of the HughesNet device.  We still have DVR, and TV and the quality is good.  For the first time ever, the AppleTV can be used to it’s full potential. WiFi Calling works, so hopefully there won’t be any more repeats of the old Verizon commercials “Can you Hear me now?” While running around the house to find “The Spot” where the cell signal is strong enough to be usable.

Charter twc bh

100Mbs isn’t the fastest but it’s a big improvement over the last stats from HughesNet of 1-5 Mbs. 

An additional advantage is that the wiring closet is now devoid of two devices for the Satellite TV both of which generated a lot of heat in a fairly confined space.

This means that the router, switch, and hard drives will be happier.

Another odd thing I’ve noticed is that my network traffic is lower. My router isn’t having it’s IP address reconfigured every minute and in general the load on the whole system is lower.

We actually streamed a movie last night; Flawlessly.

Who knows? My little house in the mountains might be a place for me to work from home again.

Only time and the job market will tell.

 

Update 3/15/2017

Ah ha! 

We had to badger HughesNet to get someone out here to take their dish down. Turns out, they want you, the customer to climb up on your roof to retrieve this expensive transceiver.

Neither of us was climbing 30 feet in the air onto our roof to get this piece of tech. Of course had the installer actually done what we’d asked the dish would have been where we could access it in Winter to brush the snow off and we could have had satellite internet connection  all the time instead of only when the snow melted off the dish.

IMG 0740

But the much more interesting thing is the bubbled fused dirt and debris you can see on the business end of the transceiver.  All of that crusty stuff serves to deflect and degrade the satellite signals, both coming and going from the transceiver itself.

Of course since we couldn’t reach the dish, we couldn’t clean it. So now I know why the signal degraded over time. Even if we’d kept HughesNet we’d have been calling them for service or replacement of this unit.

I hate to even think what kind of fiasco it would have been to get them off their collective asses to fix this. Given that their tech support is tiered and we’d have no doubt been forced to work our way up the chain of command over weeks before we got to someone that knew enough to think about progressive signal degradation as a function of obstructions between the satellite and the dish much less as a function of granite dust or reflected heat fusing dust and debris on the focal point of the signal.

I hadn’t thought about it either until I saw this unit and scratched my finger across the lens.

Well, you learn something new every day…