Summer Happenings
Things have been busy as always. I got the hay loft up and filled with around 400 bales of hay with another 400 bales to go. We still need to get the driveway going too.
At work, I’m leading the process for picking our new Health Information System. It’s a huge responsibility. To give you an idea, we spent over 1 million for the current system and the new one will probably be twice that much. Needless to say I’m stressing a bit. We’re also working on a 340B drug project to save the organization around 300K+ annually. I’m working on an Intranet site, an on-call database, and a credentialing database. The boss that promoted me leaves in a week. One of the requirements of my promotion was to complete my CIS degree. I’m going to get my butt enrolled back at the university before he leaves in a show of good faith.
I’ve been spending most of my free time gaming and messing with wireless goodness. I’ve successfully created a 2 Mbps link @ 6.1 miles from the fore mentioned grain tower to the tower at work. Mind you that is with stock WRT54G routers! Pushing .25 watts over 80 foot of LMR-400 coax on the work end is killing the signal strength. I did climb the tower and point the 24dbi directional antenna to the grain tower and increase the signal strength by 2.5x. But with a total signal strength of 14…. something needs to be done.
In my testing, I have two routers on the grain tower. One dedicated specifically for the point to point link to the work tower, the other acts as a access point for the local folks I’ll connect to it. I’ve joined my tower’s radio as a client to the grain tower AP radio and get download speeds of 600kbps @ 7.2 miles (work -> grain tower -> my tower = 7.2 miles). That’s about a third of what my DSL link is. I’m hoping to get more throughput with a signal strength increase at the work end. My reasoning behind going with two radios on the grain tower is that my tests indicate that 16Mbps @ 802.11G is the fastest a point to point link will go in ideal conditions. If one of those two radios have to negotiate with another client, that cuts the speeds in half because all the traffic is wireless. It gets complicated.
I also just installed Windows 7 on my main computer. I cloned the RAID 0 array to a 1TB drive, wiped the system, and installed Windows 7 RC x64. That took about twenty minutes. I had all my apps installed in another 40… including restoring a backup of TF2. I should have done this shit a month ago. My computer feels 20% faster! The RC doesn’t expire for a year and I highly recommend installing it! This is what Vista should have been.
I also installed Firefox 3.5 and VLC 1.0.