Yesterday was kindo neat. I actually took a day off. Although I've been not working a fair bit lately, although I haven't really taken a day off per se. I've either been really hung over and not feeling like working or really tired and not feeling like working or I've been taking care of god knows what. Yesterday, however, I came into work with no intention of clockin' in. I came in solely to work on my truck. Which I did.
I finally got real high speed internet in my truck now.
SPOILERS! (Click to view)Those of you who go into chat probably have already seen Driving Cam. But it's been really sporadic. I've been using the GPRS / EDGE (what T-Mobile currently offers for their data plans) and, while it does offer some connectivity -often even performing at broadband speeds-, much much more often than not it's not really very fast. Not even fast enough to handle the relatively simple bandwidth requirements of the chat room. It all depends on how far from the tower you are, of course. Like when I'm driving I'll get to places where I don't have much signal strength and the bandwidth will drop off, often losing all bandwidth entirely. Read
this and
this to find out exactly why it drops off instead of cutting out completely like how a phone call would.
Using the data services basically makes as many "phone calls" as it can to each cell phone tower (meaning it opens time slots and uses the frequencies available at each tower. If there's a lot of people making phone calls (if you read
this you'll see that each cell phone tower can handle about only 50 phone calls at once (that depends on the tower though. That number changes, of course, as towers are upgraded))).
The
EVDO that Sprint uses is a totally different technology. It works much much better. Much better bandwidth and a lot more reliable it seems. And that's without OMEGA antenna. Once I hook the wireless device up to that I should be able to go all the way to Catalina and still have broadband. That's my ultimate goal. Stream live on-the-water images from outside of 15 mile American border and be in international waters where no laws I'd ever want to break apply. Someday. For now it'll have to be just Driving Cam.
I completely redid the computer setup in my truck, building a console that looks a fair bit better (still looks ghetto though to keep people from thinking anything nice is in there). Then I redid the wiring and remounted a speaker that fell down like a year ago. Basically just redid the data and sound setup and completely cleaned the thing out. It looks pretty nice now. I just need to build a bed cover so I can put my backpack n stuff in the bed rather than having them on the passenger side floorboard.
But I'm thinking I might take all of next weekend off and build the wall in my room. I really don't see the need to get another place entirely if I can eliminate the issues that bother me with the place I'm living now. Mainly being the privacy one. That and it's kindo hot in there during these summer months when the dryer runs. But mostly, I'm just such a private type of person I don't like people watching me all the time. The irony of this? My yahoo name. 
