Tech

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Wilson Electronics Over Promises and Under Delivers

Call me whatever you like, I will always get angry at businesses that don’t care about their customers. I work really hard for the little money I have and spend it carefully it makes me mad when a company takes that for granted.

I purchased a Wilson Sleek cell booster and high gain antenna after doing a lot of research and getting opinions from people. Nowhere was there any mention that you need an adapter to couple these two devices. The antenna even says “Works on all cellular devices” with no mention of the adapter.

The only way to know that you need an adapter is to understand that FME female and SMA female connectors are incompatible. It’s not my job to know that or even to research it. The products are Wilson’s and it’s their job to make purchase easy for their customers by providing compatible products or at least making a note that X is not compatible with Y without Z. I have found several reviews of the Sleek and the coupler chastising Wilson for this same issue.

I have now been waiting 11 days for my damn coupler to come and it likely won’t be here for another week.

I don’t want to count how much money I have lost in that time because I am barely able to get online. I spent $190 on this device, which seriously ate into my gas budget, so going up the hill three or four times a day is no longer an option.

Yes, I can get online a little at home, after pages hang and hang and hang and connections time out. What is infuriating me (and I don’t use the word lightly) is that I get 1 bar at the top of the hill with the Mifi only and can download a 330MB file in five minutes flat. Down here, with the Sleek giving me 2 to 3 bars, it would take three hours to download that same file, if the connection didn’t keep timing out. I’d give photographic evidence of this, but I can’t upload pictures tonight. In fact, I never know what I will and won’t be able to do at any given time.

Just a half hour ago, Netflix was streaming nicely and pages were loading and now I know that if I don’t manually save this post to a text file, I will lose it because the connection will time out as I press save. I know this for a fact because this is what happened last night when I wrote the bulk of this post and then set it aside until I’d had some time to cool off. You don’t want to read what I had to say last night.

In other words, don’t buy all the testimonials that rave about how many extra bars the Sleek will give you. Bars means squat! I would have been so much better off putting that $190 into Miranda’s gas tank and making an arrangement with a farmer up the hill to park in his field for a month.

Now, I’m hopeful that the Sleek will work better with the high gain antenna, but what if it doesn’t? I’ll have lost almost a month and wasted $190 because Wilson Electronics is too lazy to put on their literature that you need a $6 coupler to marry their products.

But what angers me the most is that I wrote a polite email to Wilson last week about this issue and got an autoresponder telling me a human would answer me in two business days. More than two business days later, nothing. Not even a canned insincere ‘sorry, we’ll try to do better.’ Having no serious competition is no excuse to treat your customers like they don’t count.

Wilson Electronics, you suck.

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Boardwalk Empire

The internet being absolutely useless today and therefore not being able to do any paid work worth mentioning, I started my day by sending an email to Amazon requesting a refund for the shipping I paid for the high gain antenna/booster coupler since it is now very, very late and DHL says it won’t be here for another week. It’s in Calgary. WTF DHL? Amazon gave me the refund, of course ($16, paid to have the part in four to six days business days and it’s been eight!).

I went to the post office to check for mail (fliers and the local papers) and then did a bunch of chores around the house.

Mid-afternoon, I got the trash together and put it in the wheelbarrow along with the rakes and shovel I’d borrowed, as well as two gallon jugs to fill with water.

Caroline was outside and helped me bring everything in, filled my jugs, then invited me in for coffee. We chatted for about an hour and then another neighbour dropped in to help her with something. I headed out just as Charles came in and he asked if I wanted to borrow their dolly to move pallets. Indeed. He’s so thoughtful!

Having gone through a bunch of the pallets, I’ve conceded they are too weathered to be of any real value for interior projects, but they’re still in too good shape to be left to rot. I noticed that many of of them are very solid with planks spaced closely together.

Having walked across the wet and muddy yard a few times today in my full skirt, I decided that that was going to get old fast. So I got started on a boardwalk:

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I even found one that was solid, with no space between the slats, for the other half of my porch! No more risking the chair falling into the cracks!

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Taking the Eastbound Road

I went for another long walk after supper last night, this time taking the eastbound gravel road towards Willow Bunch. I hoped to find the infamous lagoon where I can dump my black water, but I’m not sure I did. I’ll need to get confirmation.

It was a beautiful clear evening with a bright blue sky and fluffy white clouds, and yet there was spitting rain. Very odd!

I came home and finished raking the lawn so I could return C&C’s gardening equipment today.

Then, I baptized the new porch with my last Texas beer. I had been saving it for the first really hot sunny day, but I doubt I’ll work this hard on such a day! Tonight felt right to have it, like I was firmly letting go of winter and settling into my summer.

The internet gets really bad soon as it’s humid and overcast, so I wasn’t able to post this last night. Today isn’t been much better AND the latest version of WordPress is broken and won’t let me add captions to galleries or input pictures manually so I can add text below them (I have given up hope that WP designers will ever get adding media right). I have put numbered picture descriptions below.

#1 is main road extending east towards Willow Bunch.
#2 is looking south from the main road at the western edge of the village
#3 is looking north from the main road at the western edge of the village
#4 is looking east back towards the village
#5 is about halfway down lagoon road looking towards main street
#6 is looking from lagoon road to the village
#7 is looking north from the top of a very steep hill across from lagoon road
#8 is looking northeast to the village from the top of the steep hill
#9 is same as #8 but zooming in
#10 is looking north to Montague Lake (very alkaline, so no swimming or boating)
#11 is a closeup of the lake
#12 is our mostly French welcome sign (“The beautiful village.”)
#13 is our village bunny (I saw a massive hare up in the hills, but he was too fast to get a picture!)
#14 is half of my new porch (there’s a third chair behind me)
#15 is my last Lone Star beer

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A Quiet Couple of Days

This post is just so no one sends the Mounties out after me as I really have nothing to report. Yes, there are pixels below, but only proceed if you’re bored.

The weather’s been really grey, cool, and windy the last couple of days (although the sun seems to have decided to come out), so I’ve just been staying in and getting work done.

I have a transcription client who pays me peanuts, but lets me choose projects from a pool of available ones with no minimum to complete in any set period. So I turn to that client when things are slow with my better paying clients. This week, I got some really interesting ones, including some interviews that are likely going to be part of a ‘making of’ bonus feature on a DVD of a movie starring a famous Hollywood actor. Interesting ones like that make up for the poor rate of pay since it’s something I would have listened to for nothing!

But I’m not getting as much work done as I’d like because of my slow connection. It takes ages to download my transcription files and I can’t work on anything web-based, like Squidoo or the new site I will be launching shortly. There’s no rhyme or reason to what I can connect to or not, no Youtube, but Netflix is working way too well for me. Most annoying is Google, which hasn’t worked about 95% of the time since I got online at Haven. Bing works fine, though, but boy are its results crap!!!

So the connector for my booster’s high gain antenna can’t come fast enough. It’s been in Markham, ON, for days. I really should take this time to figure out how to get the antenna cable into the office more permanently than just bringing it in through the window, but the high winds haven’t made me want to get up on the roof!

In related news, I got my Verizon bill today and it really confused me, which was a tad frustrating since I haven’t figured out yet how, or if, I can even call them Canada. I had cancelled my data plan before returning to Canada, but kept my Nationwide + Canada voice plan, which is $60 a month. My bill was $44. I thought they goofed and took me off the Canada plan (ouch, I’ve been making calls!), but then I found a link to where I could download a PDF of the bill, which had more details and allowed me to go ah ha!

What happened was that I had essentially prepaid for the next billing period, but canceled the data plan before the end of that billing period. So they credited me a pro-rated portion of the data charge. Wow, these guys never cease to amaze me. There’s no way that would have happened in Canada, at least not in my past experiences with telecom here.

My phone is problematic out here. I get enough signal with the Mifi to check my messages, but not to place calls. The field where I can get online doesn’t give my phone enough bars to use. I had to make a call the other day and wound up driving 16KM (one way) to get 2 bars. I hope the high gain antenna can make the phone usable here. But I mostly use it to speak to my mother regarding work projects, so if I get here the internet speeds I got in the field, then we will just switch to using Skype or some other VOIP solution. With a good internet connection, anything is possible!

So that’s all the thrilling news out of Haven. I’m off shortly to attend Canasta night. Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of Little RV On the Prairie! *snorts*

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Netflixed

Netflix is one of those things people rave about that I thought wasn’t for me. I mean, it requires tons of bandwidth and high speed internet; right? I had the following thought yesterday.

Well, I now have 15GB of bandwidth a month, which is more than enough for what I absolutely need to do in a month. Once I get my high gain antenna, the connection is going to be pretty fast. Linda‘s Dave says that you can choose the quality of the video to use less bandwidth. Maybe it’s time to look at Netflix at little more closely.

So I did. The first thing I did was Google was how much bandwidth a typical Netflix movie uses up. To my immense surprise, I discovered that Netflix Canada movies are up to two thirds lighter than an equivalent movie in the US because even hardwired internet up here has ridiculous bandwidth caps.

I signed up for a one-month trial membership and got some recs from my best friend about what to watch. To my disappointment, Canadians don’t get the same options as Americans (but of course) so I can’t check out about 95% of her recs.

I eventually found a movie to try, it played smoothly even with my slooooooow connection, and I discovered that it used up only about 250MB (the Mifi actually updates usage in real time!). I obviously can’t watch a movie every night and do other interneting stuff, but it’s not like I have time to watch a movie every night anyway.

If I watch two Netflix movies a month, it’ll be cheaper than raiding the $5 bin at Walmart ($7.99 versus $10). Their selection, even in Canada, is pretty good. So I’m fairly sure I’ll continue with a paid membership.

Is there anything else I need to discover now that I have a good bandwidth cap in Canada?