Brrrrrr!
I don’t remember it being this cold ever, and I’ve been living in Texas my whole life. Like you, I’ve been adapting to the cold weather over the last several days. My numerous cats (I won’t say how many) are doing gymnastics in the upstairs classroom, my chickens are getting warm bowls of water every few hours, and my dog is enjoying the relative warmth of the laundry room. Candles have been collected and dusted off, ready for use this evening. Dinner will be a quick Mediterranean shrimp stew using a cast iron skillet and my propane stove. All in all, we are comfortable, not too inconvenienced.
One area this doesn’t extend to is work. I live in the country and so have very poor network connections. My house uses DSL from Centurylink (wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy). Until recently, this was the best game in town. But my local co-op electricity provider has decided to provide fiber-based broadband to its subscribers. It advertises speeds up to 1GBps – we’ll see if they can deliver. After a series of scheduling fiascos and installing the fiber box in the wrong location, they were due to install it last Friday before all of this bad weather hit but didn’t quite make it. So it looks like I missed it by a few days. Rats!
Even so, I had purchased wireless hotspot service on my mobile phone to use in emergencies. While the service can provide speeds up to 10 MBps, that requires a good wireless signal, and my house doesn’t always get that signal.
I started out naively using my normal desktop workstation in my home office, but the constant on and off of the power made it clear that using the DSL/desktop solution wasn’t going to work. So, with a few rerouted wires, I hooked up my laptop to an external monitor and fired up my mobile phone hotspot – voila! Now I’m “immune” from rolling power outs although throughput is limited. When the power is out, the battery in my laptop and phone keep things going. I was sure to also hook up the chargers so that they would charge when the power was on.
Things are still not working as well as I would like. For one, even with the hotspot connection, DNS lookups (i.e., website locations) fail regularly, the hotspot has a tendency to disconnect, and sometimes the throughput crawls to 10KBps making even simple tasks such as loading and sending email difficult.
What’s the lesson learned? Connectivity counts! TTI has a small task force working on connectivity recommendations post-COVID. I’m looking forward to implementing those recommendations as we move forward.
In the meantime, please pass the hot cocoa!
Thank you for showing the innovative spirit. My dad, a ham radio operator, imagined himself as a Rube Goldberg practitioner. Though Mr. Goldberg has been gone for more than 50 years, it is good to see that his spirit continues.