Thursday, January 22, 2009 - Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM
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LD and cell tower, Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM, January 22, 2009
Verizon BroadbandAccess goes awry
Aaarg.... something's gone awry with my Verizon BroadbandAccess setup. I left Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM earlier than I had planned to because of access issues and now I can SEE the tower right out my back window, I get 4 EVDO bars on my cell phone, and BroadbandAccess still won't connect.
I spent two hours on the phone this afternoon with a tech (Victor) at 3gstore.com (the fine folks who sold me the Kyocera KR-1 router and USB720 modem I've been happily using for the past 15 months) diagnosing my setup and never did come up with an entirely convincing conclusion about why this modem won't connect. Everything checks out - but it won't connect.
We left it that I will go into Las Cruces tomorrow and find a fast connection so he can remotely tweek something in the firmware in the USB720 modem I'm using and see if that helps.
We also left it that I will seriously consider upgrading to a newer modem and router. It'll be a bit expensive but I'm thinking this might be the way to go. It turns out the Kyocera KR-1 router and USB720 modem I bought about 15 months ago were at the end of their product life cycle at the time and are not well supported anymore. I think I might bite the bullet and go ahead and replace them now rather than try and nurse them along any longer. Especially since two hours of nursing today didn't get me connected.
Aaarg.....
Night camp
Site 11 - Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - good signal
- Go to Leasburg Dam State Park website
- Locate Leasburg Dam State Park on my Night Camps map
- Check the weather here
Listening
As the poet Gary Snyder said so well, "Beyond all this studying and managing and calculating, there's another level to nature. You can go about learning the names of things and doing inventories of trees, bushes, and flowers. But nature often just flits by and is not easily seen in a hard, clear light. Our actual experience of many birds and wildlife is chancy and quick. Wildlife is known as a call, a cough in the dark, a shadow in the shrubs. You can watch a cougar on a wildlife video for hours, but the real cougar shows herself only once or twice in a lifetime. One must be tuned to hints and nuances." After more than thirty years of living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and spending a great deal of that time out-of-doors, Snyder has seen the mountain lion on just a few occasions. One of these sightings was most unusual. Gary had been visiting a neighbor and was walking down from the nearby ridge to his home when he observed a cougar sitting near one of the windows of the house. The animal appeared to be listening intently as one of Snyder's stepdaughters practiced the piano.