"My best traveling was done during winter months when the cold has settled in and my feet are bared; the icy earth quickens my step." -- John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed)
Rough night/morning, failed to fall asleep until well after dawn ...
Was woken by one of the two phone calls I'd expected someday soon from
my ISP[*]. "Can we come
out in the next couple hours to adjust your antenna?" (The other
has to do with my not seeing a transaction for the automatic billing in
January -- I should get around to calling their billing office about
that.) Tech's on the roof now.
In the last photos I took, the pole holding the antenna looks
bent. I'm not sure whether that's a trick of the angle or the wind
really bent the pole.
In the time it took me to type that, the tech came back down, rang my doorbell, and said all is well again. The pole was bent by the wind; he bent it back. The lag/burst effect I saw a few days ago was from the wind moving an antenna on and off pattern, but it wasn't mine, it was their main link to their upstream provider. And I'm now the customer with the second-worst wind problem, no longer the worst. (A customer down by the water had an antenna like mine attached to a similar number of cinderblocks blow right over -- *splat* -- on Saturday.)
Note that although I haven't been checking FTP times to verify that I've been getting all the bandwidth I pay for, I haven't noticed any connection problems other than that laggy/bursty behaviour for a couple hours a few days ago. They noticed a weaker signal than they liked at their end and decided it ought to be adjusted before it got bad enough for me to notice.
Urf. I really need to go hit a drug store and a grocery store, and ought to try for the nail salon, but I have a monstrous headache and my eyes are being wonky. Maybe after rush hour, if some Imitrex fixes things ...
Whoops. Forgot to mention the impending roof repair (once Mom makes some decisions) and ask how to handle the antenna for that. Huh. I wonder whether it would make sense to just seal the cinderblock base to the roof with goop and treat it as one more chimney to be flashed instead of trying to move it out of the way and back into place.
[*] Er ... as long as I'm praising 'em, I ought to mention their name for Google's sake, right? They're Believe Wireless, I've been happy with their service and the price, and recommend them to folks living close enough to Baltimore or Owings Mills to have a line-of-sight path to one of their antennae -- and for folks in other areas who have gotten fed up with phone- and cable-company shenanigans to check whether a similar outfit is operating in your city.
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