An Eclectic Mind

Today’s Amazon.com order.

From living in Wickenburg, I’m extremely accustomed to online shopping. In fact, other than groceries and minor household/hardware items and, of course, feed for the horses, I buy just about everything online.

Today, I started work on a book that I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about yet. And in using my MacBook Pro, I realized that I really miss my Mighty Mouse. So I ordered one. It’ll be here by the time I get back from my Brewster gig. I ordered a wired one because I really hate the wireless version of this mouse. (I have one at home and purposely didn’t bring it.)

By the way, I wrote extensively about the Mighty Mouse here.

I also ordered two birdwatching books. Birds of Washington, which I borrowed from the local library, impressed me so much with its photos that I bought the Arizona version, too. I don’t know if this author has done all the states, but if you’re a birdwatcher and prefer photos over drawings, this might be the book for you. See if its available for your state.

What’s nice is that even though I’m away from home, I can still get my mail here. General Delivery is a wonderful thing.

An update to a recent post.

Less than 12 hours after the unhappy Internet guy set me up with service in my camper at the golf course (as reported here), that service was disabled.

By the irrigation guy.

Here’s the strange but true story.

Since the Golf Course folks were paying for the Internet installation, it made sense for them to have an Internet connection at at least one of their computers. For simplicity’s sake, they decided to use the computer closest to the router. Although it looked like a regular desktop PC, it was actually a PC dedicated to the operation of the golf course’s irrigation system. A complex Toro software/hardware system enabled the golf course staff to activate any of its sprinklers by radio from anywhere on the course.

The PC in question was connected to a simple antenna on the roof that was about 18 inches from the antenna the Internet guy installed. You can just about see it in this picture; It’s the white pole behind the pizza box antenna.

Well, as soon as the Internet was connected to that computer, the otherwise bored golf course employees decided it was time to go surfing. I don’t even think the Internet guy was gone before Explorer was launched and at least one employee was checking out YouTube.

I knew this was going on, but it didn’t really register that it could be a problem. I was oblivious, just happy to have my connection.

Around 9 PM, there was a knock on my trailer door. It was still light out — the sun doesn’t set until about 9 here this time of year — but I was in my pajamas, lounging in bed with a book. I threw on a pair of shorts and came to the door. It was the irrigation guy. I’ll call him Carl, even though that’s not his name.

“The Internet guy screwed up my computer,” he fumed. “I can’t get the sprinklers to come on. It’s all screwed up.” I could tell he was pretty angry. “Do you have his phone number?”

I handed over Pete’s card. He stormed away with it.

I didn’t think anything more about it.

Until the next day. My Internet connection still worked for a while, but the signal wasn’t very strong. Some rain on the camper sent me to the airport to pull the helicopter out, just in case I had to fly. When I returned at about 9 AM to keep myself busy until I got a launch call, the Internet was down. In fact, my computer couldn’t even find the wireless network.

I went into the golf course office. The router was gone. I later found it in a pile of wires and cables and transformer boxes on another desk.

I asked the guy at the desk what had happened.

“Carl couldn’t get the Internet guy on the phone and his sprinklers weren’t working. So he called his daughter out here and they disconnected the Internet.”

I later found Carl. He was still fuming. “That computer is for the irrigation system only,” he said. “If you touch anything on it, the system goes down. They shouldn’t have put the Internet on it. The Internet guy didn’t call and I had to do something so we disconnected it. I had to do a restore from last Tuesday. I think I got it working again.

I should clarify here. The only way “the Internet” was connected to his computer was via a single Ethernet cable from the router. That’s it. The computer was not doing anything to keep the Internet connection alive — although for all I know, Pete may have used its browser to configure the router the previous day. All Carl had to do was disconnect that Ethernet cable. But he’d pulled it all out.

All except the power to the Internet antenna.

I discovered this on Monday when I attempted to reconnect everything — except the irrigation computer, of course. I had Pete on the phone and he gave me a physical description of the box between the antenna and the router. Carl hadn’t disconnected it, so the antenna was still powered and operating.

I got the system all back up and running, then asked Carl to test his system. He went outside with a radio and tried it. “It won’t work,” he said.

I powered down the router and asked him to try it again. It still wouldn’t work, even though it was basically the same as it had been all weekend when it did work.

I unplugged the little box and asked him to try again. He said it still wouldn’t work. But now nothing was connected. When I pointed that out, he looked at his radio and said, “Well, maybe the radio isn’t charged up. It’s acting like it’s not charged.”

Patience, Maria. Patience.

“How about if you charge it all up and we try again later?” I suggested. “Maybe after lunch?”

He agreed. He put the radio in its charging station and I left everything unplugged.

Later, he came by my camper. “The antenna is too close,” he told me. “I called the irrigation support people and they told me the Internet antenna was conflicting with my system.”

I’d already explored this possibility with Pete. He didn’t think it was likely, but since we didn’t know the frequency of the irrigation system’s radio, we couldn’t be sure. Carl didn’t know the frequency.

After he’d driven off to look at something out on the golf course, I slipped into the office. A mousepad provided by Toro listed support phone numbers. I dialed one of them. Moments later, I was explaining the situation to a support guy. I asked him the frequency of the radio system. He said it was in the “400 range.” I had no idea what that meant, but figured Pete would. I asked him if he’d ever heard of the system conflicting with an Internet setup. He said he hadn’t. I also discovered, during the phone call, that Carl had not called their support number since the beginning of June. So that means that either Carl was lying or someone else had told him the two systems would conflict. Sheesh.

I spoke to Pete. We agreed that there was no conflict. But he promised to come by on Tuesday (today) to move the antenna farther down the roofline.

With luck, I’ll have my network backup by this afternoon.

A place for my best photos.

I’m an amateur photographer and, like many amateur photographers, I sometimes get lucky and capture a better-than-average image. While I’ve often shown my best photos here, I’ve been wanting to put them in a place of their own for a while.

I don’t like Flickr. I don’t think I want my photos as part of what seems to primarily be a social networking service. I do have a Flickr account, but I rarely put photos there.

I did set up a RedBubble account. When I first signed up, the service was small and I was very impressed by the quality of the work there. These weren’t snapshots and doodlings. These were pieces of artwork. And, when I ordered some cards and framed prints, I was extremely pleased with the high quality of what I received. Cards were printed on thick photo paper. Framing was professionally done and properly sealed in back. This was how I wanted my best work to be presented — among other high quality work, available for sale at reasonable prices for high quality product. I wrote about my initial experiences and excitement about RedBubble here.

Well, RedBubble has changed. As the service grew, it became just another image-based social networking service. A mutual admiration society where many people were uploading images that, in my opinion, were pretty crappy and other people were telling them how good they were in five word praises. Photos over-corrected with Photoshop. Cell phone images! Besides, the management of RedBubble seemed more interested in “art” than photos and really pushed that kind of work. I’m not an artist and really didn’t like much of what the RedBubble folks were pushing. The print quality, however, remains good, so for now, I’ll continue to upload my images there.

But I didn’t want to use RedBubble as a showcase for my photos. I wanted something better. Something more personalized. Something that showcased just my photos.

The answer came a few months ago when the folks at Automattic, makers of WordPress, and eight6 jointly released a theme called Monotone on WordPress.com. I tried it out and liked what I saw. The theme had the amazing ability to sample the colors in an image and choose one as the background for the image. It was like color-coordinating the mat for a matted photo. The results was unique and visually attractive.

But I had a few problems with the WordPress.com-based theme. The biggest problem was the way it handled post tags — it pooled them with tags from all WordPress.com users. So if I tagged an image with the word “Arizona,” clicking a link for that tag in my photoblog post would display posts tagged “Arizona” on all WordPress.com blogs. I was not interested in maintaining tags for the benefit of other WordPress.com users. (Sorry, folks.) And I certainly wasn’t interested in maintaining a photo blog with so many exits to other blogs. So After my initial trial, I stopped posting.

But Friday, I discovered that Monotone had been released for WordPress server installations. I decided to give it a new try by installing it on my server. The result is what you can find at http://photos. marialanger.com/.

I did have some problems with the installation. I think it’s because I followed the instructions to the letter. (Silly me.) When I removed the .htaccess file that had come with the theme and used the Permalinks feature of WordPress.com to create a new one, the problems went away.

Then I was able to customize the theme by making minor changes to its template files. For example, I inserted copyright information and reformatted for lowercase throughout much of the blog. I also made the vertical image format page wider. I’ll continue tweaking — I always do — but for now, I’m pleased with the way it looks.

And most image posts link back to RedBubble, where the image is available for sale in a variety of formats.

I hope you’ll visit Maria’s Pix and participate by commenting on my work. Your feedback will not only help encourage me to stick with it, but will help me to be a better photographer.

I finally get a reliable Internet connection.

I’ve been trying, since arriving here in Quincy, WA, to get a reliable Internet connection. Today I succeeded. Sort of.

I’m camped out in an RV park at the Quincy Golf Course. The golf course has just changed ownership and the new owners — the Port of Quincy — are trying hard to get the place up and running for the summer. They’re doing a damn good job. But they didn’t have Internet and they had too many other things to think about before adding it.

One of the people who works there, Matt, lives about four houses down the road. I could see his network from my computer, but it was secured. He kindly gave me the password. For the next week or so, I could connect during the day and take care of file transfers, Daily Show Downloads, blog posts, and e-mail. But when my next door neighbor returned around 5 PM each evening and parked his truck in front of his camper, my connection was cut off.

I could use my Treo and did so when there was no other choice. It uses Bluetooth with a Verizon service called BroadbandAccess Connect — which is also known as Dial Up Networking (DUN). (I wrote about DUN here in an article titled “Setting Up Your Mac to Use a Smartphone’s Internet Connection.”) I pay $15/month for this service and it’s worth it. It’s the only cellphone based Internet service I know that doesn’t have a bandwidth cap. I don’t like to use it because (1) it’s not terribly fast — perhaps 256-512 kbps and (2) when I get an incoming call, not only does it disconnect me, but my Mac always seems to need restarting before it will connect again.

I researched other options. All wireless options had a bandwidth cap that was far lower than I needed. (5 GB a month? Are they kidding?) Other ISPs who worked in remote areas — I’m in the middle of farmland 5 miles outside of town, for heaven’s sake! — didn’t serve this area. But there was one ISP who did serve this area.

I contacted them shortly after arriving, when I realized that the borrowed access wasn’t going to serve my needs. It’s obviously a small company. I spoke to two different people. I won’t use real names; let’s just call them Don and Pete. Don was evidently in charge of sales and was anxious to make a deal — even for a period as short as two months. Pete was the technical guy who did the installations and evidently had no desire to come to Quincy. Pete made a lot of excuses. It kept getting put off. Then I got Don on the phone again and made a deal with him. I was willing to pay $220 for two months of broadband access. (I really need access to get my writing work done.)

Pete came out to check my site. The service they offer is the same type I have at home. They mount an antenna in a high place and point it at their antenna within visual range. Then they attach a router to the local antenna and I’m in business.

Pete seemed pissed and was not very friendly. He went through the motions of pointing the antenna at one of two sites. But he was standing on the ground and he wasn’t trying very hard. He said there was no signal. He couldn’t help me.

I wasn’t about to give up. It had taken two weeks to get him there and I wasn’t going to let him leave. I suggested putting it on the golf course’s clubhouse building, which was 100 or so feet away. I talked to the golf course manager and he said okay. He also said that they also wanted Internet service, so they’d pay for the installation. All I had to do was pay for access for the two months I wanted it.

Pete didn’t seem happy about this. He said he’d come back in “a day or two” to do the installation.

Of course, he didn’t come the next day.

He came today and did the job. He put the antenna on the roof of the building and set up the router in the golf course club house office. He connected one of the golf course computers via Ethernet. Then he came to my trailer and fetched the MAC addresses for the three laptops I have with me. (I really am serious about getting some work done.) He programmed them into the router so no one else could get access without paying for it. After a few false starts, we got all three of my laptops to connect, although my old 12″ PowerBook doesn’t pick up the signal as well as my MacBook Pro and Dell Latitude. I joked with him about living in a trailer with three laptops. He didn’t laugh. He still wasn’t happy. I wonder if that guy is ever happy.

Then he tried to collect $220 from me.

I told him the golf course people said they’d pay for installation. He got Don on the phone. I talked to him. He was very agreeable. When we hung up, I wrote a check for $70 for the next two months of access. I should be gone by then.

After he hurried off to be cranky elsewhere, I discovered the shortcomings of my connection. First of all, it drifts and sometimes drops — although it’s been pretty good for the past few hours. Second, they must have a port blocked because I had to reconfigure Mail to use a different port to send e-mail. (Read more about this solution here.) And third, because I’m sharing the connection with the golf course people, if they do some heavy surfing, my connection slows down.

But overall, it works well enough. And the price was less than I was willing to pay.

June 24, 2008 Update:
Read how this situation changed the very next day.

I discover that when my cell phone can’t connect, text messaging may still work.

As I reported in another blog post, I was recently stuck in a location that had an intermittent cell signal. At one point, I’d have 3 or 4 bars (out of 5). But a moment later, without even moving, I’d have the No Signal symbol in its place.

It was vitally important that I communicate with my husband, Mike, before settling down for the night. If he didn’t hear from me, he’d worry and he might take some kind of action. I needed to tell him where I was and assure him that I was okay.

I was a campground, where I hoped to spend the night. Although I was towing a pull-trailer and could have disconnected the trailer from the truck and driven to a place with a better signal, that would have been a huge pain in the butt, especially since it was raining.

After multiple attempts to connect by phone, I started wondering if I could use text messaging. I use that feature of my phone quite a bit — mostly to post tweets on Twitter when I’m traveling. I seldom text anyone else. But on that trip, I’d gotten into the habit of sending a quick text message to Mike to update him on my location. Now, with a spotty cell reception, I started wondering if I could communicate with him by text message.

So I tried it. The phone said I had no signal, and when I tried to send the message, it warned me that the message had not gone through. But it also said that it would attempt to send the message as soon as it got a signal. And less than a minute later, the message was sent. I sent a few more to fully explain my predicament and assure him that I was all right. Then I went about my business, setting up camp.

I didn’t receive a response, so I started worrying that perhaps he hadn’t received the messages. So I composed another message asking for a response and walked over to where the reception seemed better than at my site. I got two messages from him. Two-way communication had been established. Mission accomplished. (Really, though.)

Mike’s not big on texting. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that he hates it. He’s not a good typist on a computer keyboard, and his phone isn’t set up for texting since it doesn’t have a alphabetic keypad. (He has a Raz’r; I have a Treo.) So his texting skills are minimal. I know he wasn’t happy about communicating with me like this, but it did work, so I don’t think he can complain.

As for me, I just find it interesting that I could send and receive text messages — with a delay — when it was impossible for my cell phone to make a voice connection. I’m going to keep that little tidbit in my bag of tricks in case I find myself in a similar situation.