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getting the equipment working at Chris' vegan old-folks'-home
Tuesday, July 25 2023
Early this afternoon I returned to Chris' second house, the one he'd bought recently with hopes of making it into a vegan old-folks' home. This time he wasn't there (he flies all over the country doing financial stuff that nobody has explained to me). I once again tried getting the ASUS ZenWiFi mesh devices working, this time with the assistance of two different laptops and a cellphone (though there doesn't appear to be AT&T service coverage at the house). I thought I might need a Windows laptop after the Spectrum website complained about my Chromebook being too old somehow to run the app required to change its settings, something I would need to do to assign the proper SSID to the mesh devices. In short order, I was back in the same techno-hell I'd been in yesterday, occasionally screaming at the devices for being so fucking stupid. Gradually, though I managed to make some progress. Further research showed that the "reset" I was doing to the mesh devices was not a "factory reset"; that had to be done using the WPS button, and there are at least four different styles of devices, all of which need to be factory-reset a slightly different way. None of this is stuff I want to have occupying my head, and it's one of the reasons I stopped doing computer housecall work more than fifteen years ago.
Even with the mesh devices factory-reset, I couldn't make them mesh together. So I turned my attention to a different problem: running phone lines out to the kitchen using one of the existing ethernet cables (these had been pulled through the walls by the previous owner). I'd brought my soldering iron because the plan was to solder phone connectors onto the cable at either end. But then I realized I hadn't brought any solder, and there wasn't any in the Chevy Bolt's toolkit (a problem I would remedy).
This had me driving into Woodstock, which was surprisingly bustling despite rumbling thunder and sporatic rain. I went into Houst Hardware looking for solder, grabbing a variety of spray foam for the cabin foundation project while I was there. The solder was so hard to find I had to ask where it was, and even then the cashier guy didn't know. I eventually found it back in the plumbing supplies. As I later explained to the cashier guy, there are two kinds of solder, one for plumbing and one for electronics, and they were both back in the plumbing section (though I think this is fairly common at hardware stores). While I was in Woodstock, I thought I'd also buy some wine for some out-of-town guests whom I know to be appreciators of that sort of beverage. So I figured out where Unfiltered is, the store where Lisa bought the wine she'd brought to the cabin, and went in there. There's a surprisingly large staff in that little store, and all of them wanted to help me. The presumably unfiltered selection was a little pricey for my palate, but I found some cheaper 1.5 litre bottles in the back.
Back at Chris' old-vegans'-home, I decided to make a last attempt to get the two mesh devices to mesh. And then something made me realize that they were already meshed and probably had been from the start, even through all the factory resets. When I'd been trying to add a "another" device to the mesh, it thought I wanted to add a third, which of course I didn't have. This was so fucking stupid; why could't their damn interface make clear how many devices were already meshed?
I managed to drop some hot solder on the side of my right forefinger while soldering the phone plugs onto the stripped ends of ethernet cable. But when I went to test the phone, it had a dial tone. I was out of there by 4:00pm.
Back in home in Hurley, I've been gradually scrubbing the black mold off a white leather chair that Gretchen inherited from her maternal grandmother (she'd thought it wasn't leather or she would've never taken it). It had spent many summers down in her library, where summer humidity allows mold to live in places one wouldn't normally expect. The chair is looking pretty good now, if a little antiqued. The one finishing touch was to use superglue to add some string to reattach a button holding one of the cushions in place. Superglue is pretty effective at bonding two strings at their frayed ends.
Another task I've been working at is decommissioning the old computer desk I'd built back in 2007, the one with the sliding surfaces allowing me to easily move two monitors out of the way to access some shelving behind them. After replacing it with another custom desk and giving it to Powerful (he was living with us at the time), he used it as a computer desk. But then when he moved to Albany, he left it behind, and it's been sitting in the basement hallway all this time. I've been removing what I can remove, but some of it is so tightly glued together that I will need to use a chisel. I'm thinking the basic desk part (including some of the slide-out surfaces) could be useful in a shop environment, either here or in the basement of the cabin. For the time being, though, it's out in the garage, which Gretchen has been nagging me to clean now that I don't have a job.
As for Gretchen, she went out tonight with Lisa (the same Lisa who visited the cabin with Bill this weekend) to see the new Barbie movie, which has set the culture abuzz.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?230725 feedback
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