More on those Recent Problems
Oct. 1st, 2012 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aTo address recent issues:
Munchkin. For the last week and a half or so, Munchkin has crazily taken to lying on a rug in the upstairs bathroom all day and all night. No one takes this as a very good sign, though she does wander out to eat every once in a while, as long as the food is close enough (e.g., in my office). This really seems like sick-cat-hiding behavior, though she often chats with us as we go by. So, I dunno. Probably, though. Unfortunately, we've also opted to stop giving her those apetite stimulants for the moment, as they were obviously making her miserable the nights we gave them to her (shaking, maybe vomiting, and generally acting distressed). We may change that if her eating declines, but we've never been certain about giving old & sick cats meds that make them unhappy.
DSL. So Sonic.net replaced DSLExtreme today, and the quality of our 'net connection jumped way up. It was just FLYING this afternoon. Unfortunately as the evening has gone on, I've seen slowdown and dropped packets from my office. This seemed to be the result of the Sonic.net wifi not working as well as I'd like (or as well as the old wifi was). It just didn't seem set up well to deal with a high-contention wifi environment like South Side Berkeley. So, I called Sonic.net about half-an-hour before they closed down their customer service for the day, and a tech came on and fiddled with our wifi settings. The result looks *much* better. It doubled the quality of the wifi in the same room as the device and did much more than that back in my office (and at this point, much better than I was seeing on the old DSLExtreme/my-wifi setup). Yay for the wifi experts and pretty damned impressive service.
Now, just as was the case with our DSLExtreme throughput, our wifi quality has also been degrading as long as we've been in Berkeley. More and more students with their own setups, which seems like it's a generally growing problem for urban centers. So, I think we actually need to wire the back couple of rooms of the house, but that's now officially a problem for a different day.
Bathroom. There's been no work on the bathroom in a week now (though our contractors suddenly showed up to haul garbage on Friday, leaving our back yard much more acceptable). Oh, and as a nice surprise, Kimberly showed up Saturday evening with the medicine cabinet we'd picked out, thanks to a ride from a friend. Word is that our new sliding glass doors are supposed to arrive at the hardware store on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, Kimberly has our painting company coming out to show us some samples so that we (by which I mean Kimberly) can decide on colors for the bathroom. So: sliding glass door and medicine cabinet will hopefully go up this week, then painting will hopefully occur next week, then we'll be done.
Bike. Got another damned slow leak in the back tire of my bike, probably when I was riding on Saturday. I saw it Sunday when I went to go for a ride, said screw it, it'll probably be fine, pumped it up, went for my ride, and it was. That's something to be said about slow leaks. On the plus side, I've also gotten better at fixing them. This evening, I had the tire off, out, tested, patched, and back on in the time it took to watch 0:38 of an episode of Glee, minus most of the commercials (except when I forgot and watched them because I was mostly focused on the bike). I looked at my tires more carefully today and saw that the back tire is indeed getting pretty worn, which is probably why I've had the cluster of flats. So, if it happens a time or so again, I'll probably just get a new tire.
And I've noted that even if my "teflon" tire isn't keeping me from getting punctures right now, it is keeping me from getting quick leaks that might strand me in the middle of the hills (or worse: the middle of Oakland at night). So yay for that.
Munchkin. For the last week and a half or so, Munchkin has crazily taken to lying on a rug in the upstairs bathroom all day and all night. No one takes this as a very good sign, though she does wander out to eat every once in a while, as long as the food is close enough (e.g., in my office). This really seems like sick-cat-hiding behavior, though she often chats with us as we go by. So, I dunno. Probably, though. Unfortunately, we've also opted to stop giving her those apetite stimulants for the moment, as they were obviously making her miserable the nights we gave them to her (shaking, maybe vomiting, and generally acting distressed). We may change that if her eating declines, but we've never been certain about giving old & sick cats meds that make them unhappy.
DSL. So Sonic.net replaced DSLExtreme today, and the quality of our 'net connection jumped way up. It was just FLYING this afternoon. Unfortunately as the evening has gone on, I've seen slowdown and dropped packets from my office. This seemed to be the result of the Sonic.net wifi not working as well as I'd like (or as well as the old wifi was). It just didn't seem set up well to deal with a high-contention wifi environment like South Side Berkeley. So, I called Sonic.net about half-an-hour before they closed down their customer service for the day, and a tech came on and fiddled with our wifi settings. The result looks *much* better. It doubled the quality of the wifi in the same room as the device and did much more than that back in my office (and at this point, much better than I was seeing on the old DSLExtreme/my-wifi setup). Yay for the wifi experts and pretty damned impressive service.
Now, just as was the case with our DSLExtreme throughput, our wifi quality has also been degrading as long as we've been in Berkeley. More and more students with their own setups, which seems like it's a generally growing problem for urban centers. So, I think we actually need to wire the back couple of rooms of the house, but that's now officially a problem for a different day.
Bathroom. There's been no work on the bathroom in a week now (though our contractors suddenly showed up to haul garbage on Friday, leaving our back yard much more acceptable). Oh, and as a nice surprise, Kimberly showed up Saturday evening with the medicine cabinet we'd picked out, thanks to a ride from a friend. Word is that our new sliding glass doors are supposed to arrive at the hardware store on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, Kimberly has our painting company coming out to show us some samples so that we (by which I mean Kimberly) can decide on colors for the bathroom. So: sliding glass door and medicine cabinet will hopefully go up this week, then painting will hopefully occur next week, then we'll be done.
Bike. Got another damned slow leak in the back tire of my bike, probably when I was riding on Saturday. I saw it Sunday when I went to go for a ride, said screw it, it'll probably be fine, pumped it up, went for my ride, and it was. That's something to be said about slow leaks. On the plus side, I've also gotten better at fixing them. This evening, I had the tire off, out, tested, patched, and back on in the time it took to watch 0:38 of an episode of Glee, minus most of the commercials (except when I forgot and watched them because I was mostly focused on the bike). I looked at my tires more carefully today and saw that the back tire is indeed getting pretty worn, which is probably why I've had the cluster of flats. So, if it happens a time or so again, I'll probably just get a new tire.
And I've noted that even if my "teflon" tire isn't keeping me from getting punctures right now, it is keeping me from getting quick leaks that might strand me in the middle of the hills (or worse: the middle of Oakland at night). So yay for that.