Running Bear's August 2025 Coffee Shop

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Good morning from humid Wisconsin. 74f degrees now 88 later. The humidity is 94% but the 10mph breeze and 18mph gusts is making it feel ok on the south deck. The Air Quality is rated as good at 56. We are being threaten with local flood warnings and severe T-storms today with the storms between 3 and 9pm.

Since we are talking internet speeds I ran the tests. The house is wireless after the router and I am on my IPadPro about 95’ from the router and outside

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What the slow speeds tell me, as they should be double, is that the beloved wife while dusting her office the other day adjusted the equipment (moved the router or antennas).

I made the mistake of turning down at OPS session on the BN Marais Pass for today. Instead I was going to a work session. 2nd time this week he had to cancel because of illness! Turns out the guests are from the Milwaukee area including some from Model Railroader and include Eric white, Cody Crivno and David Popp among a few others. If any of you listen to the podcast Around the Layout this week’s 54 minute program was an interview with friend and owner of the BN Marais Pass, Alan Schroeder. His layout is built as a mushroom, is in the 800’ mainline range and is just a super operating time.

We are taking the daughter’s family out for dinner this evening. Terry and I will be too busy this week as are they. We leave next Saturday for our travels. So other than the hockey on Wednesday we probably will not see them unless the grandson’s team keeps winning. I left the choice of restaurant with the daughter which usually means very good food but at a price! Oh well, you can’t take it with you!

No work session means I have a free day! Not sure what I’ll do with it but I’m sure the breeze will diminish and I’ll be chased indoors by the humidity

Enjoy the day
 
Morning all,

80° and cloudy this morning, weather types predicting 101° later. Finally broke 100 yesterday with the high being 102°.

Slept pretty good last night for a change. Knee didn't really hurt when I shifted, which is a good thing.

Gotta start sorting peaches as some are ready now, and some will need a few days. I had a large branch break during a windstorm a couple weeks ago, but the leaves were still being kept fed by the tree. We picked everything and mostly cleared the limb. I gotta remember to clear some of the peaches before they get too heavy. This peach variety (Loring) are heavy producers. Way heavy producers.
 
Morning all,

80° and cloudy this morning, weather types predicting 101° later. Finally broke 100 yesterday with the high being 102°.

Slept pretty good last night for a change. Knee didn't really hurt when I shifted, which is a good thing.

Gotta start sorting peaches as some are ready now, and some will need a few days. I had a large branch break during a windstorm a couple weeks ago, but the leaves were still being kept fed by the tree. We picked everything and mostly cleared the limb. I gotta remember to clear some of the peaches before they get too heavy. This peach variety (Loring) are heavy producers. Way heavy producers.
Yeah, that's another aspect of post surgery, the cannot get sleep part because everything hurts when you move part.

When I got my arthroscopic surgery on my left shoulder, the doc said that I'd be in the hospital over night. The wife took the kids to her parents house as she always does when I'm not home. When I came out, they kicked me out of the hospital that day. Couldn't believe it. Wife was in shock as well.

So, she took me home, makes my bed and leaves me alone to go tend to the kids, who were 3 and 4 at the time. I told her to go and that I'd be fine. I forget what drugs they gave me, but it lasted long enough.
 


Mornin' folks. Well, your morning, my evening. It's 80F/75% on the patio this morning. Just cool enough that the humidity isn't bothering me.

Last night's steak was wonderful. I'm mildly intoxicated (it may be 7AM, but this is almost bed time for me!), and just relaxing. Will go to bed in a few hours, I think; staying up as long as I can so that I can get to my appointment on Wednesday on a normal person's schedule.

I stared at the trains earlier, but didn't even run them. Sad. Crawled back into my fiction after dinner, and mostly remained there.

I'm only really posting to toss a few responses, and to again wish you all a good weekend!

Yup, I go wired as much as I can. I hate wireless but other members of the family can't be bothered. When I had the house built, I installed a MTOA in each room. It provides two power outlets, BNC for TV and CAT6 outlet. The TV and living room have two each. But of course, it ain't enough, eh?
Same. While WiFi has gotten much better over the the years, it still has nothing on wired.

I had to look up MTOA; hadn't heard that term before. I have generic keystone wall plates in every room; most rooms have a pair of cat 6 (I didn't bother with coax or... anything else). My entertainment center has a quartet, and actually does have coax to an antenna in the attic. I kinda wish I hadn't bothered with that quartet, though; a single uplink and a switch would probably have worked better there.

And no. It's never enough. :)

Another consideration is the router's wan-lan speed.
True, though most modern provider-supplied routers are capable of meeting wirespeed with multi-gig uplinks and downlinks these days from what I've heard. Personally, I'm using an old EdgeRouter 4, which has only gigabit ports, but it does the job for my network (which is complicated enough that OSPF (which I use) or similar routing protocols are very useful internally).

Honestly, though? Even gigabit is massive overkill for the vast majority of homes in my opinion. Sadly, that includes mine these days...

Next step for me is to compress and simplify all the stuff in my server cabinet since I no longer need the hardware overkill (yay retirement!), and then I need to think about simplifying the network as much as possible. I'm trying to remove the maintenance burden of all this techno crap in my house... I still enjoy it to a degree, but having it as a requirement is no longer okay.

Sadly, I don't have kids who can take over maintaining it for me. :(

Since we are talking internet speeds I ran the tests. The house is wireless after the router and I am on my IPadPro about 95’ from the router and outside
My WiFi is variable here, partly because my AP is a decade old. Oddly I get better results from the train room than I do right under my AP:

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I was actually quite surprised it was that good. I'm lucky to get 100Mb outside, which is actually less distance. Unfortunately I also seem to have sat on my iPad Pro at some point and bent it slightly, which I think ruined the WiFi antenna. It often loses connection outside, where my laptop is fine. I'm just not to the point of replacing it yet, 'cause it works fine indoors.

On the wired side, on the other hand, I get much better speeds:
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Always need to take these things with a grain of salt, though. It's also limited by whatever is on fast.com's end (and how busy they are), and whatever routes are taken to get the traffic there, so it's not guaranteed to be a fair assessment of your connection.

Still fun to play with though. :)

And now I'm putting the keyboard down again... 'Night, folks.
 
I went inside to adjust the WiFi router because the lack of speed was bothering me. Played with the placement and adjusted the antennas and after a few minutes work I’m back out side on the south deck 95’ from the wireless router. I’m happy again…

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We have TDS and pay $50 per month for 1g speeds. It’s a good deal
 
Well howdy there internet peeps and those who remember the days of how Dial Up modems killed a robot so you could play on AOL.

It's Troy again.

Today is the NMRA Div 3 picnic on the N. Side of Ft Wayne. I'm heading up there to meet a bunch of modelers I probably haven't met yet.

Last night the cat stayed in the basement by his own choice. I suspect we're keeping the upstairs bedroom too breezy. It's always hot up there and we have to run a portable AC unit in the back bedroom and use fans to blow that cool air into the master bed.

He's using his litter robot mostly, but the litter box we put in his favorite non-allowed piddle spot is seeing some action. Hopefully that stops in the next week as we get him past his old-man arthritis symptoms.

This morning, instead of writing, I decided to sign up for some shared promos. Authors all have email newsletters, and we use a service that lets us all share links to a page with links to our books. One person organizes and makes a graphic for the page, then the participants all share during the promo run to our newsletter readers.

In the process of doing that, I realized the Universal Book Links page for my main two free books that I feature in these promos were out of date. I spent an hour chasing down the links to the ebooks and audiobooks at the various retailers, updating the book link page, and my spreadsheet of such.

So, I'm counting that as work. :)

BBL!
 
Good morning all!

The weekend is finally upon us!

Going to be another warm one! Currently its 78F humid degrees out. the high is supposed to hit 90F. Maybe a few showers this afternoon.

Not sure what's on the agenda for today.

Last night I spent a little time in the train room. I covered up the ground painting test areas with a layer of sculptamold since none of those
colors are going to work for me. A new round of paint is supposed to ne delivered today.

Have a safe day everyone!
 
Good Morning All. Clear and a rather warm 77°, maybe hitting 100° today. It didn't make it yesterday, reaching just 99°. The NWS is giving up on the triple digit forecasts after today, maybe since they have been wrong almost all summer. Our average number of days hitting 100° or higher is 20. This year we have hit it twice. For comparison, in 2011 we hit triple digits on 71 days.

Started mowing yesterday and got maybe 1/4 acre done before I threw the mower deck belt. It's no longer usable. I have a new one, but it requires two people to reinstall a certain retaining pin; no neighbor was available all day! I quit checking after 3:00 and will check it out this morning. It's a ludicrous design that I wasn't aware of when I bought this tractor. Bubba has helped me twice before.

Out in the train shed yesterday, I just touched up the ground cover around the fuel distributor a little bit.
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I do have a handful of trees to add along the non-existent backdrop in front of the window; and I will probably add a few more figures and vehicles next. What's next after this??? I have no clue but I'll be looking at the lengthy to do project list for ideas. Might just ballast that bare track in the foreground instead of waiting to finish the scene to the left.

Mike -
You will do fine!

Spoil them rotten, keep them up late, and send them home to Mom and Dad very cranky!
You forgot about the part of feeding them some high-sugar candy before they leave!
Michael - I too can relate to the "little clothing since retirement". I wear shorts and tee shirts from March until Thanksgiving, sometimes longer, no socks any more even in winter; and casual clothing just for an hour a week for church.
Patrick - With that kind of labor rate, I'd be charging them for any peach pie or cobbler! After last years tornado, I paid my two teenage grandsons $80 each for 4 hours of debris clean up, only to find out later that my wife handed each one an extra $30 when I wasn't looking.

FWIW:

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Works for everything that we have on it (10 known devices), including the TV when weather knocks out the satellite signal.
It's that time of year for the Perseid meteor shower, tough to see because of the full moon last night. But it is visible just before dawn here right after the moon sets.
Everyone have a great Saturday.
 
Wille: They don't like peach pie or cobbler. More for me. The youngest 2 do like fresh peaches.

 
We upgraded last year to fiber from AT&T DSL service. I bought the 100MB service as it is just the 2 of us in the house most of the time. Fiber a lot more stable than DSL and the cable company is so bad, I don't even consider them an option. All they have for "fiber" still has the copper line into the house. Sorry, still copper. My low level fiber still cheaper than the DSL line was.
 


We ditched Comcast cable 2 1/2 years ago and went with Fiber and never looked back.

Problem with Comcast was they screwed with the bill every year and raised it significantly. You had to spend a half hour on the phone to get a better rate. Had to do this every year. We have a couple of streaming services and was able to significantly lower our TV/Internet costs.

Nice thing with the Fiber is, the rate is never supposed to change. What we pay now is supposed to be a guaranteed rate for life.

Much happier since it seems just as fast as cable.
 
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