At the Park – Day 20 – Seeking Simplicity

So, I glossed over the resolution to yesterday’s water mess at the house. Rachel had the brilliant idea of borrowing an extension cable from the neighbor and plugging the sump pump into a different outlet as she discovered that the GFI outlet it was plugged into was dead and would not reset. She was in the process of cleaning up the water when Brian arrived and confirmed that the GFI outlet was toast. He made a run to Menards for a new one and then replaced it. No obvious point of entry for the water. It rained heavily earlier in the day. My theory is that with the GFI blown, the rainwater saturated the ground and entered the house through the pit overflowing onto the floor. I am thankful that it was rain water and not septic water. I am thankful Rachel happened to be working in the area for a friend, noticed the garage door was opened and stopped to close it. I’m thankful the water detection alarm I bought and installed a while back was working and Rachel was able to hear it from the garage and she had the where-with-all to go investigate. I am thankful Brian was available and able to take care of the outlet. Even with the stress I was feeling upon receiving the news I had a flooded basement on a house I just signed a counter offer to sell, clearly the Gods were smiling on me with everything that aligned for the issue to be discovered by Rachel in a timely manner then be resolved in an equally timely manner. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I also failed to mention that while I was away reviewing the work to be done on the road bordering the property, with the trailer roof vents wide open back at the RV park, it rained. So here we go: I’m thankful even when rainy it is low humidity relative to Michigan so my bed was dried out before bedtime. I am thankful my computer equipment was not under a vent. I’m thankful the trailer doesn’t have any carpet.

Tuesday was a workshop day at work meaning I was on the phone all day listening to a presentation and discussion on new technology we are preparing to start using at work.

After work I installed the new WiFi system here at the RV park. Went well other than I installed one of them in the wrong spot. Still seems to work well. Certainly not good enough for an enterprise installation. I’m not sure if Seth, our wireless SME at work, would laugh or cry at the low signal strengths (-85dbm) I’m leveraging to relay the wireless signal from one end of the part to the other in this wireless mesh configuration. That said, the WAPs are not currently line of site as I didn’t have a ladder with me so the two out at the camp sites are only mounted 7ft in the air. Driving through the park using iperf3 to test bandwidth back to the raspberry pi in the office, the lowest I had was 1Mb/sec. That is sufficient for browsing the web (albeit a bit slow) and doing email. Park rules are no streaming video and no large downloads on the park’s free wifi out of consideration of sharing the 10Mb/s down dsl internet circuit. Sorry, I don’t remember what the up speed is. I have 30′ ethernet cables being delivered tomorrow. They will get a ladder and mount the WAPs 15-20′ up so as to be able to shoot the signal over the top of the RV’s for a better uplink to the office and hopefully sufficient penetration into all the RV’s when the park is full. They will likely have me get one more WAP. They had 1 WAP base station with a directional antenna and 3 repeaters with amplifiers spread through the park. I’m simply replacing all four with Ubiquiti omni directional mesh WAPs. In addition to the wireless updates, they may be getting a second 10Mbps DSL internet circuit and bonding it with the first.

Ok. Ok. Enough tech talk. I must confess… I’ve been stalling, waiting for photos to upload to the flikr from my phone.

Ugh… To no avail. I seem to be iphone challenged. Ok. I know what to do, I was just trying to avoid it.

And here we are. For those of you that have eyes glazed over from the tech talk, here is your reward for hanging in there… photos.