Monday, July 30, 2007

Wildlife at Bruce


It is strange that every heavy industrial and military site I ever visit they have tons of wildlife. Here are some wild turkeys at Bruce Power nuclear generation site.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Addy said Pop today


We were all sitting around eating lunch this afternoon and Addy said Pop plain as could be after Rika said it. She got a kick out of us being excited. Haven't had her say it again yet though.

Rika's dad, Bill, is visiting from Colorado it is really nice to have him he is so easy to around and helpful.

I've decide to switch our online pictures over to flickr from snapfish. Snapfish is a big old pain and very restrictive in how we use our pics. More on this later. For now goto our flickr page.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Addy's Swim lessons


Addy has started swim lessons. We are in a tiny town in Ontario, CA and they have organized swim lessons for infants. Carlsbad, NM does not even have a public outdoor pool.

Addy likes the water, but it is a tad cold for her. She could also do without the dunking part.

Panonamic shots


I'm trying to get the hang of panoramic stitching of digital photos. This is the view right outside our drive-way in Paisley, ON. We'll be here one more month.

So we are living in a little farm house way out in the country in Ontario Canada. We share it with a sizable colony of bats but otherwise it is a nice place. This is the view from our place.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Hughesnet up north

I've just installed Hughesnet Satellite internet service at the place we are renting in Canada while I'm working up here for a client.

The house already had a 0.74m dish on it the previous renters had installed. They were deadbeats and skipped out on rent and took the modem from the system with them. I found a used HN7000S on ebay got it activated via Montana Satellite. I had to repoint the dish since I was commissioned on a Satellite normally used for US subscribers. The repointing and commisioning process took awhile since Hughes thought I was using a different modem, and the ranging took some time.

I was getting fine signals on receive and cross-pol, but no ranging. Finally I came home from work one day checked the modem status, it was still red (No service), re-booted the modem and then we were up and running.

If you have no other choice hughesnet is ok. If you have anything else available that is terrestrial I would go with that... DSL, Cable, WiMAX, EVDO, etc. Even if a landline has speeds as slow as 128up and down it is still preferable to Satellites latency and unreliability. For now we are so in BFE satellite is our only choice.

-NJT