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Fast Connection

Last night Dustin had three of his friends over for a birthday sleep-over. We ordered pizza from the restaurant in Puyo, and they played Xbox and watched movies. I knew they were going to stay up late, and when I went to bed at 1:30 AM tney were still going strong. I guess they were trying to stay up all night, and made it to 5 AM before falling asleep. By 10:30 AM I had them up and was feeding them pancakes and bacon. After that I headed over to Kelley's house with the hope of getting the wireless connection to their house up and running.

Curtis and I climbed the tower and mounted the radio, and then ran the ethernet cable down the tower and into the study. At that point we crimped cable ends, set up the computer, and plugged everything into the hub. I opened up a web browser and went to the admin page for the Tranzeo radio, and sure enough, we were connected to the radio at the MAF base, with a full 11 Mbps connection! Later, I went up on the tower and aimed the radio a little more carefully, and was able to improve on the signal a little. The connection is great, and it's just like sitting at a computer connected to the LAN at the hangar. It will work really well for Rachel to work on the finances from home, which is the reason we set this connection up.

Today was a day with a couple close calls and one accident. At one point after the radio was mounted on the tower, it started to rain. I remembered I had a 5 gallon bucket clipped up on the tower by the radio because I was intending to go back up and fine tune the aim of the radio. I scrambled up to the roof to go get the bucket. It's a tin roof, and of course gets slippery when wet. As I was crossing the roof, my feet slipped right out from under me. I immediately found myself thinking about how close I was to the edge of the roof and wondering how far I'd slide. Turns out I didn't slide too far, and was able to get up and walk the rest of the way to the tower. Whew, close call, especially considering I was on the second-story roof. Later in the afternoon, I was coming down off the roof for the final time, and was going to use the small ladder to get onto the balcony. Because the balcony was wet, the ladder slipped out as soon as I put some weight on it. Fortunately I was holding on a pole mounted on the corner of the roof. Ellyn has been praying for me each day I'm working on the tower. Two close calls today and I wasn't even on the tower.

The accident occurred as I was going to take Curtis's truck over to the hangar to get some installation CDs that I needed. There have been a couple guys doing some painting work on the Curtis's house, and they had a couple cans of paint in the street right in front of the truck. I didn't seem the cans, and you guessed it, I drove right over one of them. I heard this strange popping sound, and stopped the car to find out I had splattered white enamel paint all over the street and on the underside of the truck. Fortunately not too much paint got on the bodywork of the truck. It looked like the truck had been four wheeling through marshmallows. Why coudln't it have been latex paint?!? We left the truck there, and Chad (MAF pilot who lives on the first floor of the same building) drove us over to the hangar to get some laquer thinner and some absorbant material to soak up as much paint as possible. It took quite a while, but we got most of the mess cleaned up. Curtis decided not to worry too much about the paint under the truck, figuring it will wear off quickly, especially since most of it is on top of dirt and/or grease.

Tonight we had a goodbye party for the MAF families leaving Shell. It was held at the hangar in the new meeting room. All the employees were there also, and we had Mexican food for dinner, and then a time of sharing where the departing families shared their plans. It was a nice evening, and I'll miss working with a great group of people.