The Return of the Blog

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

At long last, the return of the blog! It is not as if I have not been blogging actually. I started a blog on my company's internal blog site. My new manager (my 10^th different manager now during my 9 years with this company) has encouraged our team to blog once per week internally about work related items. While some of my new teammates were not very excited about this team goal I actually started salivating at the prospect of having blogging as part as my job for which I am paid.

So, what has happened since my last blog in early October? Well, we still do not have any internet access at home though I am researching my options again. DSL and cable internet are still not options so we are left with either satellite, line of site, or a cell phone data plan. My main concern is the ability to connect to my company's VPN and be able to work from home on some days. I have heard that satellite does not play well with VPNs in general and you typically have to have a clear view of the southern sky for the best connection. Since I have a lot of trees and since the satellite dish left over by the previous owners is mounted very high on my detached garage with a long, underground cable ran all the way to the house, I am going to guess that satellite internet access would require a similar set up.

I did do some research on the MiFi device that can be used by Sprint of Verizon (the cell phone company we use for the wife's phone). This little device seem pretty cool in that you bring your network with you and can connect up to 5 devices. This seems ideal for me and I do get a pretty strong signal on the wife's cell phone here at home. The one drawback is that there is a 5GB per month limit on throughput. This works out to about 167 MB per day. This would likely prevent us from doing any streaming of videos (YouTube, Hulu, etc) and would likely cause us to have to monitor our usage to make sure we don't go over the monthly limit (at a $0.05 per MB cost). I did a little testing and am estimating that I would use 200MB per day for a normal day at work. This would cause us not to be able to use the internet at all or very sparingly if I worked from home very often.

This leaves the line of site option. I actually have a friend at church that uses the line of sight provider that services this area of Indiana so I am hoping I can take my work laptop out to his house and do some testing soon. This is the cheapest option actually overall. All 3 options would require a 2 year commitment and have some up front costs. While the line of sight has a higher upfront cost, it is less per month. I have high hopes (usually a bad sign) that this will work. I will have to keep you posted.

So, what else? Christmas went well though we did remember how nice it was to have a simple Christmas in Texas with no family locally to have to make time to visit on Christmas day. I will save my presents for another blog but we all got some cool stuff that we are still playing with today. My company forced us all to save 8 days of vacation to use for the last 2 weeks of the year so for the first time in about 15 years, I had 2 weeks in a row off of work (since I was laid off each summer at a bowling center I worked at a lifetime ago). I was concerned about going insane but once we opened our Christmas gifts, the last week was OK. Surprisingly I did not have too much of a problem getting back into the swing of things when I returned at the beginning of this month.

Either I have nothing to blog about or too many things or maybe I am just out of the habit. We are getting ready to head out to a local Mexican restaurant with our flock group. This means that I will be at a popular restaurant on a Saturday night with a large crowd. If you know me at all, I don't like large groups or busy restaurants so I am not really looking forward to this. I am sure all will be well but I still would rather stay home or do anything else but this. Well, Oreo appears to need to be petted so I better cut off these random thoughts.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon