03.28.08
Posted in Broadband, Rural Tech at 4:42 pm by Randy
…we still don’t have “real” Internet up here.
However, we have gotten better with the fake Internet than I think we could’ve possibly imagined. It all began with replacing the P.O.S. (code for “ultimately inadequate”) Kyocera KR-1 router with (of all things) a Mac Mini running OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”). Our uptimes went from minutes between reboots to literally days and days between network disconnects. Add in that the Mini doesn’t need to be restarted pretty much ever, and it’s the best $600 I’ve ever spent.
It cleared up all the difficulties I had with VPN into work, it’s perceptibly faster than with the KR-1, and it damn near never disconnects, no matter how hard I pound the connection. Suddenly, YouTube was not a ridiculous notion. I even managed to download a rental movie from iTunes over the connection. I won’t say that I’m thrilled with the throughput. But hey, the fact that I can run BitTorrent fills my heart with peace, such that I feel no desire to run BitTorrent.
Sometimes, just being able to do something allows you to let go of the desire to do it. Other times, you probably go ahead and binge on downloading DVD sized ISO images.
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07.19.07
Posted in Wine, Local Issues, Geek at 5:37 am by Randy
I’ll be doing my friend’s radio show this next Monday, all by myself. Turns out he has a football mini-camp he’s leading (seeing as he’s a coach and all), and he wrote to me in a panic at the beginning of the week. The last time I stepped into a radio booth all alone was 1988 or ‘89. That’s quite a dry spell.
At any rate, my major concern is that I don’t totally suck or do something completely embarrasing with nobody else around to keep me in check. The biggest issue is that I’m not a winemaker or even in the wine industry (except that I’m married to a grape grower, and I’ve just finished my first class over at Napa Valley College having to do with wine).
This will definitely be interesting.
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07.13.07
Posted in Broadband, Local Issues, Rural at 1:28 pm by Randy
Time passes.
The Boss gets chickens.
My sister moves in.
The dogs “play” with the chickens (or at least all but one of them).
The fiber optic shows up.
The enclosure for the media converter shows up.
Things are starting to move again on the Quest for Broadband.
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06.26.07
Posted in Broadband, Geek, Rural at 4:41 pm by Randy
As I sit patiently and wait for my evening Summer class at Napa Valley College (Current Topics In Winemaking — cruel irony is that the “current topic” is “Historic Wineries”), I look out at miles and miles of hillsides in Napa Valley, covered in bright green canopies of grapes. Some Chardonnay, some Cabernet, some Syrah, not much Pinot; a wide expanse of agriculture, all wrapped up in the pretense of wine as some exclusive drink made for stodgy old men with seven-figure incomes. Trust me, nobody ever became truly wealthy by growing grapes.
However, I digress.
Subchapter Two, Continued:
We needed to dig a trench right down the middle of (part of) the road to the vineyard. It wasn’t going to be pretty, either. Just walking the road, you could see the surface of boulders and rocks, almost as if the road had been paved with cobblestones, albeit gigantic ones of all shapes and sizes. Nevertheless, our Solar God thus proclaimed, “get thee a ride-on trencher, and all will come to pass as I have foretold.” Apparently, the kung pao of the walk-behind trencher that Mr. Handy had been using was clearly not spicy enough for the task. So, after much delay (and at least two breakdowns of Mr. Handy’s truck), we had the ride-on trencher delivered.
It took a day for it to break.
The rocks were so big and so tough that even the ride-on trencher was denied. It was so bad, the chain on the trencher came off, shearing two bolts on the arm that holds the chain in place. So, we were left with one option: backhoe. That’s right, time to bring in the heavy artillery. Unfortunately, as Mr. Handy frequently mentioned, using the backhoe meant that we would almost certainly be tearing out a lot of road, because any rocks or boulders that the backhoe lifts out would in most case be wider than the twelve-inch bucket that was on the backhoe.
In truth, I’m glad Mr. Handy was so up front about it. Honestly, I am. Because what my eyes beheld once the trench was dug down the road was nothing short of horrific. I actually thought to myself, however briefly, “oh crap, what have I gotten us into?”
It almost didn’t look like a road, there was so many rocks strewn about on either side of the trench. The trench itself averaged probably 15 inches wide, and it was deep enough that I was down past my knees when I walked in it. Yes, I walked inside the trench.
Happily, the chapter ends on an up note: the pipes and wires were laid into the trench, covered in sand then layered with rocks and road base as backfill. Then we were able to bring in additional road base to help level out the road a bit. In the end, the scar left behind from the trench was analogous to a scar you might see on someone who had been through open heart surgery. Yes, it looked ugly at first sight, but you quickly realize that it had looked much, much worse.
And the work is not done, not nearly. There is still getting all the fittings on the various pipes to join them together. There is ordering and having the fiber optic pulled from the vineyard gate down to the house. There’s burying the rest of the trench. There’s hooking up the electrical and fiber optic at both ends. Only then might we realize the glory of real broadband. I am now absolutely certain that it won’t be real for me until at least a week after the project is fully finished.
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06.23.07
Posted in Broadband, Rural Tech, Geek, Rural at 8:52 pm by Randy
“Let me explain… No, there is too much, let me sum up.” - Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride
I try my best not to go all meta-blog around here, presenting my excuses for how I’m too busy or that I’m just too damn lazy to update this site. But I leave you with the following thought: A man’s gotta have his priorities. Moving on.
Much has transpired in the intervening months, albeit the goal is still tantalizingly out of reach. Dear reader, allow me to catch you up.
- We own a construction crawler, vintage 1985. Hey, it’s got a backhoe, what can I say?
- A trench was dug from the antenna site to the house.
- Part of that trench was dug along the straight section of the road to the vineyard, effectively destroying it.
- The Solar God smiled upon us and did grace us with a divine visitation to bury electrical cables and conduits along said road section.
- We still do not have the wires connected to the power panel in the garage, nor do we have the electrical boxes installed up at the antenna site.
- The fiber optic that will pump those lovely ones and zeros isn’t even ordered.
- We expect that we won’t be up and running until the end of July at the earliest.
Subchapter One: The Crawler Of DOOM
The crawler has an interesting story. Our next-door (meaning about a mile downhill from us) neighbor (a uniquely crusty old Brit, who made his fortune through logging in Northern California) moved to a Central American country last month. As part of his departure, Crusty was selling his old John Deere 450C loader crawler. A crawler, as opposed to a backhoe) uses tracks instead of tires, making it better suited for the ranch and its hilly terrain. Even though it was seriously old and long in the tooth, he wanted ten large. In an uncharacteristic turn, I haggled him down to eight. Of course, I’m still wondering who got the better deal.
Crusty spent a fair bit of time describing all that was wrong with the machine: hour meter broken, seats basically destroyed by the elements, lights not working, switches missing, hydraulic seals leaking like sieves, bushings completely gone on just about every pivot point, yada yada yada. So, as long as we used it in the daytime, didn’t lift hugely heavy items using the front loader, and we kept 20 gallons of hydraulic fluid on hand to keep the reservoir filled, the sucker would do work for us. Never mind that your ass would be sitting on bare metal and we literally have no idea how long that the crawler has actually been used over the years, those really are just subordinate issues. The crawler has a backhoe and it was shown to me that it could dig.
Of course, The Boss and I salivated mightily. We still recognized that we will need to have an agricultural tractor, so this crawler wouldn’t be able to do every little thing that we need around the ranch and vineyard. But the siren song of the backhoe could not be denied, even The Boss was taken in by it.
Subchapter Two: The Trench of DOOM (drink)
The trench presented several significant challenges. Originally, the Wunderkind was going to dig along the uphill side of the road to the vineyard, through all the twisty turns and across several culverts to go down, down to the house. But Mr. Handy (who, bless his heart, should be called Mr. Overtime, since he never knows when to frigging quit working) and I walked an alternate and slightly more direct route, which would avoid most (if not all) of the culverts, and stay off the road almost completely, so that we wouldn’t need to be concerned with vineyard traffic (which, at this time of year is basically about every ten days so they can spray sulphur on the vines). It also shaved about 100 feet off the distance that the Wunderkind originally estimated.
When the time came to dig the trench, Mr. Handy dropped everything and walked behind the big-ass trencher through hill and dale, suffering poison oak, bug bites, and sunburn to bring the trench down the hill, skipping across one of the seasonal gullies (because it was way too deep to dig under, and way too far to go around). We got to the final stretch before the meadow above the ranch house and realized that it was a rock garden. Correction, a boulder garden, and most of them were above ground, with no telling how much worse it would be underneath. No trencher known to man would cut through that, so we figured we would lay the conduit above ground and call it a day.
Of course, it wasn’t until the Solar God gazed upon our plan that He shone His holy wisdom down upon us: laying the pipes and conduit above ground would only work up until the first forest fire; the pipes and conduit would quickly melt and our glorious pipeline would be destroyed (and yes, I realize that if a forest fire blows through the ranch, we’ll be worried about more than whether our Internet connection is working, but stay with me on this). So, our hopes rested on the one thing we didn’t want to do: dig a trench down (part of) the road to the vineyard.
But there’s more, oh so much more. Stay tuned.
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02.10.07
Posted in Broadband, Money, Rant, Rural at 9:47 pm by Randy
After a fabulous January, where we enjoyed a long and luxurious streak of clear (or at least only partly cloudy skies), we have arrived at February, with the inevitable return of the winter rains that I so dreaded in December. The Boss flogged me ceaselessly to get the new greenhouse built (and at least partly covered with panels) before the heavens opened up. Naturally, I obliged, knowing my place in the grand order. The greenhouse itself came entirely in pieces, and was put together with great gnashing of teeth over the wretchedly written instructions (clearly written by someone who had never built on of these greenhouses, let alone taken a technical writing class). The entire story of the greenhouse will undoubtedly be told in a future post. For now, suffice it to say that it is standing and (mostly) keeping the weather out.
After about two months of using our interim broadband solution, we’ve come to realize that indeed, it is only a distant cousin to true broadband, and doesn’t quite fit our expectations for fast, reliable, “prosumer”-class Internet speeds (including glorous BitTorrent nights and unabashed iTunes video and podcast downloads). I find myself continuously trying to keep a mental tally on the amount of bits we’ve slurped over the airwaves, wondering how much closer to the dreaded 5GB limit that our service provider imposes. Hence a pattern emerges:
The Boss: “I’ve purchased a subscription to 24 on iTunes. I’ve missed four episodes because the TiVo is dead.”
(Aside: our venerable circa 1999 DirecTivo died and was replaced by a grand 160GB upgraded Series 2 model from Weaknees. Yes, it is muy macho. However, the Weaknees replacement was going to show up a day late for the start of the next season of 24.)
Me: “Hmm, that’s going to be a problem.”
Inside my head: Holy crap, we’ll hit the 5GB cap in no time.
The Boss: “It’s no big deal, only 250MB per episode.”
Me: “But it doesn’t take that many to add up to 5 gigs.”
The Boss: (deflated) “Hmm, good point.”
Don’t get me wrong. The Boss went ahead and downloaded them, because to deny her Jack Bauer and his ridiculous antics would be asking for my left eyeball to be plucked out and used as a cat toy. Anyhow, my paranoia has generally increased, and my discomfort at being subject to what I consider arbitrary restrictions on my usage of the Interweb is distracting me from doing what I’d like to be doing online. So, to ensure I can live online undistracted by such limits, I have once again taken up the quest to link our house to the antenna that sits forlornly up at the vineyard, powerlessly (literally) pointing to Sonoma Mountain and our future lifeline to the net.
I spent the next couple days enjoying my lunch break by browsing our favorite giant orange home improvement center. It seems that, based on their prices, we should be able to get the quantity of conduit and pipe necessary to go the distance for somewhere upwards of $400-500. Then we add the apparent price of fiber optic (on the order of $800), the rental of the trencher (for who knows how much) and finally, the solar equipment up at the vineyard to power the rig (somewhere in the $2500 range). Suddenly, this is looking like a job that will run us between 1/3 and 1/2 of the Wunderkind’s nasty $16k bid to do the job that I knew we could do ourselves.
Yup, Winter is a little bit past the halfway mark, and it’s time to get busy again.
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Posted in Broadband at 8:42 pm by Randy
I was in the midst of upgrading my blog software, when I kept running into a little snag: uploading on this “broadband” service is basically on par with dialup, and it sucks. It’s basically restarting the conversation in my head about when I’m going to get started with the final solution for our Internet needs here at the ranch.
However, I’m left with little choice but to wait out the weather and let the ground dry out just a bit more before we tear up the road to the vineyard with a trencher and 4500′ total of conduit and water pipes.
All questions of “where the Hell have you been for the last month” can be tabled for another time. There’s work to be done here.
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01.04.07
Posted in Wireless, Broadband, Geek, Money, Rant, Rural at 11:27 am by Randy
The Boss has been on me about updating the blog. The holiday doldrums, with its gray skies, wind and rain, has caught up to me. I have “cave-itis” pretty bad at the moment. It manifests in the overwhelming desire to sit in a dark room, staring intently into a LCD flat panel display.
Happily, we received our Kyocera KR-1 router
, and our online life has begun to approach something akin to normal. Now I know that last statement is a bit heavy with equivocation, but hear me out. We now enjoy lazing around in various rooms using the Internet on our respective laptops. I have managed to make my Vonage phone work over this connection, and I’m not leashed to the window in our living room in order to do whatever I want online. I even have been able to VPN into work and be productive. But here’s the thing: Verizon BroadbandAccess is not broadband, at least not how you would normally consider it. It is a wireless data service (and at $80/month, an expensive one) that Verizon wants you to use only for certain tasks. And after reading it, it’s pretty clear that the way I want to use it is not the way Verizon wants me to use it. To wit:
Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation).
The emphasis is theirs. So, here’s the risk to our Internet stopgap: if we go over a pre-set bandwidth limit, they assumes we’re abusing the service and may kill our subscription without notice. Again, from Verizon:
Anyone using more than 5 GB per line in a given month is presumed to be using the service in a manner prohibited above, and we reserve the right to immediately terminate the service of any such person without notice. We also reserve the right to terminate service upon expiration of Customer Agreement term.
Fun.
So, while I am blogging about this and being quite open and honest, my desire is to just fly under the radar and hope that Verizon doesn’t pull the plug on my subscription before I’m able to install the “Trench of Dreams” and run the fiber link to the “Antenna of Doom”.
Speaking of the Trench of Dreams, I recently received a lovely pair of StarTech media converters
, these beauties will convert from the rather limited reach of Category 5e copper (say, about 100 meters) to multimode fiber optic strands (which can pump data up to 2 kilometers). Each one draws 9 watts, when added to the 7.2 watts that the radio at the vineyard is rated to draw, we have devised a relatively low-power rig for getting the real Internet to the house.
Also, a new character has come to play: Mr. Handy. We actually met Mr. Handy indirectly through our pan-dimensional super being, Solar God. He has turned out to be, well, quite handy in a number of projects around the ranch. He’s also a real easy guy to get along with.
Well, through no fault of his own, it looks as if he needs a place to stay, and the ranch having the extra cabin (small as it is), we have a place that is serviceable. Can you say “barter”? (I knew you could.) So, it might be that we will get the trench dug up to the vineyard for just the cost of renting the trencher.
After that, the major costs will be getting the materials (PVC conduit in varying sizes, fiber optic cable, copper wire) to get power, data and water to and from the vineyard. There’s still no strong estimate for solar versus copper for providing power. However, having run the numbers myself, I believe it would take about 5000 feet total of 1/0 AWG copper just to run a 20 amp circuit from our current panel up to the vineyard. Sounds just a bit prohibitive to me. Getting a basic solar installation seems much more likely to fit our budget.
So, as strange as it’s turning out, we’ll definitely come out ahead of the Wunderkind’s $16,000.00 Challenge. It’s now just a question of “how soon”?
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12.23.06
Posted in Broadband, Wireless, Money, Rant, Rural at 12:00 am by Randy
Nothing says “speed” like hauling ass to work during the week before Christmas. On Friday, I blazed to work, even after having stopped by McD’s for the #3 with coffee and a Sausage McMuffin “NO EGG”. The women who work the window there are relatively familiar with me, a distinction I don’t find all that comforting. We’re not on a first-name basis, mind you, but I’m sure that if I asked one of them for her name, she wouldn’t think I’m stalking. But socializing with the McDonald’s chicks will have to wait for another day.
It now seems that the pruning work is underway in Napa’s vineyards; more and more of the vines, now dormant after giving their all for the California wine industry this year, get themselves a little haircut. With the miles and miles of vineyards between home and work, I expect it will take a couple months to give all those vines a shave.
With a certain amount of trepidation, I resumed the research into how best to overcome the Wunderkind’s $16,000.00 barrier to our full re-admittance to the 21st century. The trench seems a fait accompli, with the acknowledgement of The Boss and TBB that the ranch will ultimately benefit from having it, and not just for data. And granted, the antenna is installed up at the vineyard, but without a suitable link between here and there, no bits will flow.
The bits must flow…
Thus, I bent my will to understanding what a fiber optic link would entail. Several terms swirl through the ether: multi-mode, single-mode, 50/125, 62.5/125, SC and ST connectors, zip cord, et cetera. After much gnashing of teeth and clicking of mouse, I struck up a chat with BIL (sister’s husband). As I may have mentioned, he does fiber optic as part of his work, and knows the ropes, as it were. After a half-hour, we concluded that we’ll buy multi-mode 62.5/125 fiber optic, 500 meters (around 1640 feet), BIL will pull the fiber through the conduit and terminate them (and I chose ST connectors), and we’ll use StarTech media converters. The fiber itself will cost upwards of 750 to 800 clams, whereas a pair of media converters comes to a mere $350.
Jeez, this crap starts to add up.
Tonight, The Boss and I talked about what’s next for our broadband lifestyle. Things are pretty decent with the new yagi installed, but I have some nagging gripes.
Me: “So, I’m tired of being the access point for the house.”
The Boss: “I can appreciate that.”
Me: “And I feel like I’m trapped, I can’t just dual-boot to Windows and play my games, since it doesn’t share the Internet as easily as Mac OS does. So now I’m looking at this WiFi router that you plug our data card into. It’d be just like the WiFi we used to have, and I can quit being tethered to the window because of the antenna cable.”
The Boss: “So, why haven’t you ordered it?”
[pause]
The Boss: “What?”
Me: “Well, it’s not cheap.”
The Boss: “Well, how much does it cost?”
Me: “Well… how much do you think it costs?”
[pause]
The Boss: “Four hundred?”
Me: [quickly] “No, it’s less than four hundred. But, it’s more than three hundred.”
The Boss starts to balk, the doubt is clearly there. We add up what we’ve spent on the data card, the yagi antenna, and realize we’re already over $300 into this “temporary” solution. If we keep pouring money into the Verizon broadband thing, we’re taking money away from Clueless Broadband (a good thing), but we’re not getting real broadband like Daddy wants (a bad thing). I go ahead and mention the possibility that maybe we stick with Verizon for the foreseeable future, and tell Clueless Broadband to go pound sand. The Boss observes that halting the trench/conduit/fiber project would free up money to start finishing off the porch (something that is a bit out of reach at the moment, due to all the spending we’ve done of late). A moment passes, then two.
Now, we both know that the amount of money we’re looking to spend on doing the trench, the fiber pull, and even the power (be it solar or a branch circuit from Hell up to the vineyard) is considerable, and we shouldn’t go blowing even more money on what we’ve agreed is our stopgap measure for Internet. The opportunity slips quietly away, and I tell her I’ll think on it for a couple days. We agree that there’s no hurry, and that since it’s Christmas weekend, nothing would get shipped until Tuesday at the earliest.
Back to my gripe: one of the things I’m missing because of the antenna cable leash is that I can’t pick up my MacBook Pro and move around the house with it. I’m stuck with what amounts to a low power-consumption desktop replacement that has to be plugged in and left at home so The Boss isn’t driven mad by lack of Internet (or more specifically, by returning to dial-up). When time comes for me to play MMO’s, I’m in the same boat: stuck the sofa by the window, no suitable ergonomic setup to be had.
I start to mull the problem, then inspiration strikes. I remember that I’ve planned to be away this next Saturday for a friend’s birthday. I deliver the coup de grace:
Me: “You know, when I go out for the birthday thing on Saturday, I will be taking this notebook with me.”
The Boss: [not missing a beat] “Just make sure that router gets here by Friday then.”
Yes, ma’am; it’ll ship Tuesday, FedEx Priority Overnight, thank you very much.
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12.22.06
Posted in Broadband, Wireless at 10:38 pm by Randy
Behold, the Wilson Cellular PCS Yagi antenna. This is 13dBi of sweet, sweet microwave gain. 
When connected to the Verizon (Novatel) V640 data card, something magical happens. Before, when connected to the 800MHz Yagi that we bought many moons ago, we were treated to speeds around 100kbps down, peaking occasionally but rarely at around 300kbps. Not thrilling, but it easily beat the 22kbps analog modem we’d be suffering through.
The 1.9GHz range boosted by this glorious strip of machined aluminum changes the rules of the game, my friends. Instead of connecting with 1xRTT, we now connect with 1xEV-DO, and instead of peak speeds at 300kbps, we now enjoy 1+Mbps peak speed. Even our nominal speed is downright reasonable, coming in well over 400kbps.
The difference in online experience couldn’t be more glaring. With 1xRTT, you can scrabble out a meager existence. With 1xEV-DO, you feel alive.
When I connected to my MMO’s last night, my ping was under 300ms. I whooped, I hollered (or at least did so in my head, because everyone else was asleep). The data rate was such that I could run Ventrilo for my game-playing VoIP needs, and still had headroom to not be sluggish while logged into my games.
I tell you, it’s almost like having broadband.
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