Posted on

Return To Waschke Road

We, Rebecca and I, have been living on Waschke Road nearly two months now. Albert and Victoria, our dogs, are used to being back on the road in a new house with a larger yard, but I can’t say that we are settled in.

This house is much smaller than our previous two houses, has many minor and not so minor things that need repair, replacement, or change to suit us. I begin each day with a task list that grows longer as the day goes on. I think that some morning, I’ll wake up and the list will be empty, but, somehow, I know that day will not come.

The decision to move back was hard. We loved the Ferndale house and the Gardiner Terrace neighborhood. The kitchen and the layout of the house is as perfect as I could imagine. I’ve never taken much interest in local politics, but I enjoyed learning about Ferndale city government and began to think that I might be able to help a growing city of wonderful people that seemed to need lessons on how to grow. A city that builds sleek new streets but fails to maintain the old, continually playing catchup on infrastructure, and generally fumbling its value proposition might benefit from my experience with corporate infighting and governance.

But I put those thoughts behind us when Rebecca’s surgeon recommended a fourth back surgery as soon as the covid-19 lockdown was lifted.

After your fourth trip to the rodeo, you begin to plan for your next visit. The Ferndale house with two stories and spacious layout would not work for us any longer. We thought about installing a chair lift but adding another complex device to our lives was not an answer we liked. We already owned a house that is an easy walk from our children and grandchildren, single story, a ramp to the front door, with space for my office and Rebecca’s craft studio, and a panoramic view of Mount Baker’s glaciers and buttes presiding over fields that my father, grandfather, and now our son, have farmed for over a century. The tenants who were renting the house were ready to move on to purchasing their own house. The instant we finished thinking it through, the decision was obvious.

So here we are. Albert, the border collie, and I are back to walking up and down Waschke Road several times a day, waving to the neighbors, treading paths and looking at sights that I have tread on and looked at my entire life.

Feels good. Not what we expected a few years ago, but we had soup made from kale grown by our farmer son and daughter-in-law last night. Feels good.

Posted on

Network Performance

I realize this post assumes more technical knowledge than many of my readers possess. In the pre-COVID-19 era, my grandson Chris and I held free consultation sessions at the Ferndale Public Library to help folks over technical hurdles. We’re working with the Whatcom County Library System to resume these sessions online. I’m in several COVID-19 hyper-vulnerable categories and do not plan to resume in-person sessions until the viral landscape changes significantly, but Chris and I miss our library sessions and hope to get something going online soon.

An image in a Zoom meeting pixilates into a messy checkerboard of colored squares. Or the screen freezes. Or a voice sounds like a chef is chopping it up and throwing it on a sizzling griddle.

These, and a hundred variations, are network performance issues, which, from an engineering standpoint, can be reduced, but never eliminated.

You may find it hard to believe, but these visual and audio burps demonstrate the computer network’s reliability. The web we experience today is an engineering miracle that has transformed a ramshackle collection of unreliable and inconsistently implemented subnetworks into a reliable global service. Unlike a traditional phone connection, which is essentially an unbroken wire from one user to another that either succeeds or breaks, computer network connections steer their own path like a car on a cross-country drive taking detours and switching highways, slowing down and speeding up as conditions change, but never stopping. Instead of failing, the network recovers and corrects itself with these gyrations.

Great. Wonderful. But we all want the broken images and garbled sound to go away.

Here are some fixes. Most are not expensive. 

Network speed check

Start with a speed check. There are many free speed checkers available. Google “free network speed check” and take your pick. Follow the simple instructions (press GO.) In half a minute or so, you’ll get a download and upload rate in MBPS (MegaBytes Per Second). You may also get a Ping time in milliseconds, (ms), but it’s the upload and download rates you want. Most aggravating problems are with downloads. An upload of a large file like a video that takes five minutes is not nearly as painful as a garbled movie image or a messed-up Zoom meeting, which are almost always due to slow downloads.

Note, however, a full-on home office may need fast uploads. Businesses pay extra for fast uploads. If you find yourself losing valuable time waiting for files to upload, a business network connection will cost, but it should solve the problem. Premium residential service probably won’t help.

We have comparatively good network service from Comcast here in Ferndale. That’s because the Comcast infrastructure here is fairly new and reliable. Other areas may differ. At the moment at our house, downloads are about 400 MBPS, upload 20 MBPS. This is good for residential service. Disregard theoretical 1000 MBPS promises. Theory is wonderful, but practice is what you get for your money.

Your internet service provider

If you have speeds substantially below ours, call your internet service provider. (Comcast, Frontier, etc.) Something may be wrong that they can easily fix with a reset or reconfiguration. At worst, they will try to sell you premium service. Ask for a free upgrade. You might get one. For internet service providers, losing a customer is often a greater loss than a free upgrade. Internet service providers often comp and discount freely to avoid completely losing your monthly payment. When 5G cellular comes online your negotiating position is likely to get even stronger.

Secrets

Now, I’ll let you in on a few secrets. Your real performance may depend more on your home network than your internet service provider. If you have a typical broadband connection, you have a modem and router attached to a television or telephone cable coming into your house. The modem separates the computer network signal from the incoming signals and converts it to the Ethernet signal used by your computing devices. The router distributes Ethernet signals to your devices. Almost all residential routers emit radio waves (Wi-Fi) that link the router to your computers, but they also have sockets (typically four) that you can use for cabled connections. These days, modems and routers are usually combined into a single device.

Modem-routers

If your modem-router is old, you might need a new one. In the computer world, newer means faster. If your modem- router is more than five years old, a replacement will almost certainly improve your performance. I use 18 months as a rule of thumb for replacement. If you got your modem-router from your internet service provider, ask for a free upgrade. They want you as a customer.

Wisdom is that you can get a better deal by purchasing your own modem-router, but the internet service providers prefer to support their own equipment and they will fight you on it. You have a legal right to use your own equipment, but, in my experience, the providers are more likely to offer a free modem-router than cease trying to charge you for using your own.

Upgrading the software on your modem-router may help performance and some serious security issues with home modem-routers have been corrected recently with software upgrades. If you can, it’s safer to opt-in on automatic upgrades.

Ethernet cables vs. Wi-Fi

When it’s possible, I use an Ethernet cable rather than a wireless connection to devices. On our home network, a cabled Ethernet connection is ten times faster than a Wi-Fi connection. Cables are their own form of torture, but they perform better.

Our house, which is only two years old, was wired with CAT6 ethernet cables but not set up to use them. When we moved in, my grandson Christopher and I worked on our inhouse cabling. Now, we can plug into wired Ethernet anywhere in the house we want. There are lots of YouTube tutorials on Ethernet home wiring if you have the DIY bent. A few special tools are almost a necessity for DIY, but you can also have the wiring done for you. If the wires are already in the walls, a pro can finish the job in a few hours. Typically, you can add an Ethernet socket to all your television cable outlets.

If you want more connections than the usual four on the router, get an unmanaged Ethernet switch, which will branch a single socket to multiple sockets. Avoid “hubs.” They also multiplex Ethernet connections and are sometimes cheap, but they are old and slow technology. Managed switches are for network engineers, not residences.

In my office I have an unmanaged five-port switch I bought from Amazon for a little over ten dollars. Connected to a single Ethernet wall socket, the switch yields four fast network connections.

If your house is not wired for Ethernet and you don’t want to spend much, you can buy premade Ethernet cables to run on the floor like extension cords from your modem-router. Shop around for cables. Prices vary. Avoid trip hazards, be neat, and don’t use cables that are longer than needed. If you coil the excess, strange interference patterns can cause erratic performance. Use switches to provide more fast remote connections than the four on the router.

Wi-Fi

Typically, you still need Wi-Fi for tablets and phones, although I sometimes use a USB-Ethernet cable adapter with my Surface tablets.

There are some tricks you can try with wireless when you have performance issues. The cheapest and easiest is to move around. Wi-Fi signals pass through most walls, but metal objects, like a water heater or other appliances can slow a signal down. High current appliances like starting air conditioners or furnaces also affect radio signals, which can explain fluctuating performance. Try to locate your modem-router centrally and close to the areas where network performance matters most.

If a Wi-Fi signal is unreliable in the perfect spot for your home office, don’t despair. Current standard Wi-Fi uses two channels: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. The 5 GHz channel is faster, but it does not penetrate walls well and it has a shorter range than the older 2.4 GHz channel. Routers today default to 5 GHz and reserve 2.4 GHz channel for old devices that can’t access the 5 GHz channel. If your perfect spot is in a remote corner, you may get better performance if you configure your router to use the 2.4 GHz channel for the device you use in your perfect spot even if it will work on 5 GHz.

If your home network covers a large area, you may want to look into a “mesh” system that emits Wi-Fi signals from more than one source. These are a more effective version of the Wi-Fi repeaters that were touted as range extenders a few years ago.

Tri-band routers have two 5 GHz channels and one 2.4 GHz channel. The router distributes 5 GHz devices over the two fast channels. Decreased congestion on the fast channels improves performance. If your biggest problem is distance, go with a mesh. If you have a ton of contending devices, get a tri-band.

Don’t just shrug your shoulders when you have network performance issues. You have a good chance of improving your experience.

Posted on

Masks For a Hard-Headed Dutchman

In my carpenter days, I thought I was a hard-headed Dutchman who feared nothing. My mother’s family is Lynden Dutch from the Netherlands. Outside Whatcom County, a Dutchman is usually a person of German descent. My father’s family is from Prussia, home to the hardest headed Germans. Both families were stubborn dairy farmers accustomed to hard work and bad weather. They formed their own opinions and stuck to them. I was turned out from a tough and hard-headed Dutchman mold.

Back in the late 70s, I was a carpenter. Sometimes I got orders to wear a mask, but I avoided them whenever I could, although I knew full well that masks were self-protection and for my benefit.

I didn’t need any stinking masks. I knew I was supposed to wear a carbon filter when I worked with hot solvents like acetone and lacquer thinner, but I was young and tough. Once, I had a job installing a Formica bathtub surround. I’ve installed acres of Formica laminate and my process was down pat. Paint the wall and the Formica with contact cement and let it dry, releasing clouds of solvent. Use thin strips of waste to separate the laminate from the wall until the surround was positioned perfectly, then pull the strips and roll the laminate down tight. I applied the cement, waited, then began to wrestle the surround into place, inhaling solvent fumes. My head started to swim, and brown clouds rushed in from the sides. I stumbled, opened a window, and turned on the exhaust fan as my vision constricted to a foggy tunnel. Fortunately, fresh air cleared my head and I was able to finish the installation.

At the time, I was proud of myself. I came through a tough spot and delivered a good job. Forty years later, I have a different opinion. I was a stupid kid who was lucky to have survived. The only good thing I can say is that I endangered myself, no one else.

In those days, I was also not as careful as I should have been around asbestos, which was all over construction sites back then. Not too long ago I heard of another tough Dutchman, a skilled craftsman whom I admired. He was my foreman on a few jobs. He died of asbestosis, a fatal lung disease caused by asbestos dust. Many of the carpenters I knew from those days are dead now, not all of them from lung diseases, but a fair number. My lungs are still good, but that’s luck, not being tough. I should have been more careful.

Forty years later, I still have some of that hard-headed Dutchman attitude. Well, so what? We tough Dutchmen make our decisions and don’t complain about the consequences. That’s what tough means to me. Back in the day, I acted like a first responder who doesn’t take time to grab protective gear. Yeah. A foolish hero. I made bad decisions but I was the one I placed in danger.

Today is different. The kind of masks that most of us are requested to wear now do not protect the wearer, at least not directly. To start with, since COVID-19 is infectious before its victims have symptoms, anyone in an area where COVID-19 is active, unless they have tested negative for the virus in the last three days, can transmit the disease without knowing it. Some people spread the virus without ever getting sick. That’s why public health officials in some places ask everyone to wear masks.

Water droplets laden with virus are the villains. Breathing, talking, singing, coughing, and sneezing all project droplets into the air. These droplets break up and evaporate into even finer particles called aerosols that hold the virus and float up to six feet before most have fallen to the ground. In cold air, they float longer. The aerosols are so fine, they are inhaled right through a cloth mask. Breathe in enough of these minute virus-carrying packets and you are infected with COVID-19. A cloth mask blocks the droplets and prevents tiny aerosols from forming. Healthcare personnel and first responders, who must get close to infected victims, don special masks that stop the aerosols, but the cloth masks worn by the rest of us only keep the droplets in, which impedes the spread of the virus, but does not protect the wearer from aerosols coming from disease victims. People wearing masks protect each other. Remove your mask and you threaten your neighbor.

If enough people wear cloth masks, and follow other practices like social distancing, frequent hand washing, and surface disinfection, the spread of the virus will slow, and we will all be safer and the daily death toll will go down.

Heroes sacrifice themselves for others; selfish wretches hurt others for their own convenience.

Where does that leave a hard-headed Dutchman who wants to own his fate? He makes his choice based on what he has learned.