Jason Spence (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} jspence) wrote,@ 2007-11-04 21:33:00 |
|
The last few weeks have sucked a little for me, because quite a bit of infrastructure has been going up and down. First, Verizon decided to move a cell tower, so my EC/I_o rating for my EV-DO radios has gone from about 2 or 3 to about 20 or so. Right now, it's 19. I ended up cancelling my Verizon service because I'm working from home on this current contract and I didn't feel like paying $120 a month in fees for something I'm not using. Besides, I'm going to convert to Sprint SERO in the near future.
Then, Comcast tells me that there's a problem with my cable modem, and takes a week to tell me that the "problem" is that it got cloned and they need to replace it. The replacement didn't work too well, and they missed a truck appointment earlier this week to replace the replacement, so I'm currently doing some pretty wacky wireless things to get online at the moment.
Today, I woke up and heard all the UPSes in my downstairs computer farm beeping, because the power was out. PG&E took their sweet time figuring out what was wrong, and they finally found the problem at about 6 PM:
That's a feeder cable that goes from a maintenance switch to the residential transformer at our complex. The burnt part is where the cable shorted out, possibly due to some wiggling incurred during the earthquake earlier this week. In the meantime, I happened to have a generator that I was holding onto until my friend could pick it up, and I'm using it to power a few things for my neighbors, like lights and and a big wifi access point. PG&E says it may take a day or so to fix the connector, so I'm digging in for a while.
One nice thing about the outage is that the 2.4 GHz spectrum is unbelievably clear in my complex right now. The noise floor dropped below -100 dBm, which is the first time I've ever seen the spectrum that clear around here. On a typical day, it's more like -85 to -90 dBm and there's easily a few dozen 802.11 beacons visible at any point in the complex. At the moment though, I've got the only working access point and I can connect to it from a block away!
Then, Comcast tells me that there's a problem with my cable modem, and takes a week to tell me that the "problem" is that it got cloned and they need to replace it. The replacement didn't work too well, and they missed a truck appointment earlier this week to replace the replacement, so I'm currently doing some pretty wacky wireless things to get online at the moment.
Today, I woke up and heard all the UPSes in my downstairs computer farm beeping, because the power was out. PG&E took their sweet time figuring out what was wrong, and they finally found the problem at about 6 PM:
That's a feeder cable that goes from a maintenance switch to the residential transformer at our complex. The burnt part is where the cable shorted out, possibly due to some wiggling incurred during the earthquake earlier this week. In the meantime, I happened to have a generator that I was holding onto until my friend could pick it up, and I'm using it to power a few things for my neighbors, like lights and and a big wifi access point. PG&E says it may take a day or so to fix the connector, so I'm digging in for a while.
One nice thing about the outage is that the 2.4 GHz spectrum is unbelievably clear in my complex right now. The noise floor dropped below -100 dBm, which is the first time I've ever seen the spectrum that clear around here. On a typical day, it's more like -85 to -90 dBm and there's easily a few dozen 802.11 beacons visible at any point in the complex. At the moment though, I've got the only working access point and I can connect to it from a block away!
SSID: "Emergency Wireless"
Mode: Managed RSSI: -65 dBm noise: -101 dBm Channel: 1
