Garage Updates

I had my the lighting in my garage 50% completed when I decided to do something different. I wasn't happy with the amount of light it was putting out and was less happy with how it looked.

Initially I had purchased some very cheap four foot lights that were designed to hang from chains and plug into an outlet. I drilled holes through these and screwed them directly to the ceiling. While researching  electrical code for hardwiring the lights, I found out that not only could I not hardwire them, I should not have mounted them any way other than by chain. It appears that the design of the light does not let the transformer cool properly unless its hanging.

The following weekend I purchased the lights I should have bought in the first place, they were five times the cost of the ones I had originally purchased. This is a case of you get what you pay for and I am very happy with the lighting in the garage now.

I have four of the six lights I purchased, installed, I stil need to move the Nova and put the remaining two lights above it. They don't take that long to install, its the decision I made to run the wiring internally that takes a lot of time.

Internet Problems

Since we have moved into our new home our internet access has been very poor. In Indiana we had Comcast cable internet and while it wasn't the fastest it did work very well. Moving into our new home our choices were limited to either satellite or Cox cable. The advertized connection speeds through Cox were much faster than Comcast but of course the reality once we were connected was quite different. After numerous service calls, replacement of F-connectors and splitters I felt we had a stable connection. Two weeks ago it quit working again.

This time it appeared to be a hard fault and after a few hours I was able to determine it was our six year old wireless router. After some research and a quick trip to Best Buy I was back home with a new WNDR3700 Netgear Dual Band N-Draft router. The setup was quick and easy although the only real way to do it was manually, the supplied software is not compatible with 64 bit operating systems. My home network speeds both wired and wireless immediately jumped from transfer rates of 2.0mbps to 10mbps, unfortunately my internet access was virtually nonexistent. Feeling good that my equipment was in order I made the call to Cox again and to my surprise they had a tech at my house the very next day, a Sunday even.

The tech could find nothing wrong with the connection he changed a couple of F-connectors and replaced the cable modem as a precaution. The connection was working as he packed up and before he had been gone for five minutes it went down again.

That week it worked sporadically and by that Friday night had gone completely out again. After screwing around with it all week and researching the problem I found I was not the only one having this problem with this router and I was unable to find a positive fix for it. Since I did not feel I should need to spend 170.00 on a router that obviously required a lot of troubleshooting to make it work, I packed up the new Netgear router and headed back to Best Buy to exchange it for another. They of course had no more of Netgear’s flagship so I picked up a Cisco WRT610N which didn't have as good reviews and was 30.00 more expensive.

Once I had it hooked up my internet worked flawlessly and the speeds were better than even advertized by Cox.

Speed achieved with new Cisco N-Draft router

The last speed test was done connected wirelessly. My laptop does have an Intel 5100 series wireless card which supports N-Draft at a connection speed of 150 Mbps versus the draft speed of 300 Mbps. The G connection speed was of course 54 Mbps. I never have seen much of a difference (with the original router) in either internet connection or my home network speeds wither I was using wireless or wired. The best speeds I had seen with the old G router were in the 7Mb/s range, with an average of around 4Mb/s.  The disparity between the download speed and upload speed is due to Cox using upload compression.

I'm very happy with the new router, I had not been really looking at them or keeping up on what was available. It has a USB port for ftp,http and network access to a drive. Being dual band my wife’s laptop or Matty’s PSP/PS3 connecting to it won’t drop my connection to the slower G band.

Hopefully I'll be able to get another six to seven years out of it before I need to go through that again.

Blog Move

Over new years the SQL database for my blog became corrupted again and I lost many of my older posts. Because I don't really have the time to figure out what is causing the problem on my server, I have decided to move my blog to Google. It also eliminates the issues with my ISP blocking ports and using redirects.

Christmas

Tania, Matty and I had a nice Christmas with just the three of us.

Because of the school canceling the orchestra, I wanted Matty to continue playing his bass. To keep his interest active with it we decided to buy him an electric bass and amplifier for Christmas.

It's hard to see in the picture but the Ibanez bass is a dark blue sunburst. The amplifier is a 10 watt studio amp with multiple sound functions. It also allows for music player amplification as well as headphones (very important).

He has played it non-stop for the last week.

Tania is a bit harder to buy for, she normally buys whatever she needs. This year was much easier, her watch had stopped working properly for the last few weeks so I got her a Citizen Eco Drive solar powered watch. Tania has a thing about watches without numbers on the face, so this one fit the bill perfectly

Knowing me like she does, she bought me an awesome stand for my Rigid saw. Something I had been looking at for a while but had not bought because I could not justify the cost versus need.

It is a Rigid MS-UV or Miter Saw Utility Vehicle. It has extensions on both ends which pull out to triple its length and those extensions have support legs that are inside the extension. The entire unit folds up and stands on end with the saw attached for storage. No more kneeling on the floor to cut wood!