Month: April 2017

Switched to satellite

The abbey is in a hidden little valley well off the beaten path, down in the woods. We wouldn’t have it any other way. But such isolation means that getting on the Internet is a problem.

For the past eight years, the abbey’s solution has been Verizon Wireless. I rigged up a nerdish system in the attic — Verizon “air cards” connected to directional antennas, with the antennas pointed toward the nearest Verizon tower (which is almost four miles away). In such a fringe coverage area, the Internet connection is slow and unreliable. The signal has to pass through woods, so performance is even worse when the trees grow new leaves in the spring. The trees have almost finished growing new leaves. We were fed up. Ken suggested that I ought to look at satellite again. He taunted me, actually. He’ll be spending the summer as a park ranger in the middle of nowhere in Alaska, in a park service cabin with only solar power and a satellite setup for Internet that he said probably will be faster than the abbey’s. I couldn’t let that challenge go, could I?

What I found was that, just a few months ago (December 2016) HughesNet launched an enormous new satellite, EchoStar 19. The satellite was built in every nerd’s favorite California suburb — Palo Alto. The satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral on top of an Atlas rocket. After a couple of months of testing, HughesNet began to offer (in March 2017) a broadband service that they call “Gen 5” or “Generation 5,” promising true broadband speeds of 25 Mbps. Not only that, I found their pricing plan entirely fair — unlike Verizon pricing, which is clearly structured to provide as little as possible for prices right at the peak of what the market will bear. I bought HughesNet’s 30 GB per month plan. That plan includes 50 GB per month of off-peak data (2 a.m. until 8 a.m.) free. If you exceed the 30 GB per month, HughesNet does not block service or scalp you for overage gigabytes. Instead they throttle your speeds (to 1 to 3 Mbps) for the remainder of the month, at no cost. Or you can buy reasonably priced “tokens” to get more high speed data. The tokens never expire. When you buy extra data, you get to keep it until you’ve used it all.

Bye-bye Verizon. And good riddance.

In the past, I had avoided satellite because HughesNet has consistently gotten poor reviews for its service. With a new satellite, a new transceiver-router box, and new network infrastructure, I’m counting on HughesNet making a comeback and improving their reputation. If the satellite service here at the abbey continues to be as good as it has been since the system was installed yesterday, I will be extremely happy. I’ll post a review after a month or so.

There is one penalty with satellite Internet service that cannot be avoided. Service must be provided from a geosynchronous satellite. That means that the satellite orbits the earth at exactly the same rate at which the earth rotates. Thus the satellite is always in the same location in the sky, so that you can point a dish at it. The distance from earth required for geosynchronous orbit is just over 26,000 miles. A radio signal to the satellite must travel 46,000 miles — up and down again. Thus the speed of light causes a delay, or “latency,” in response times. That delay is a significant and often noticeable fraction of a second. But will I put up with the latency to get true broadband at a reasonable price? You bet.

So far, download speeds are exceeding HughesNet’s promise of 25 Mbps. We’re consistently getting 45 Mbps. Not only is that fast, it’s the fastest Internet connection I’ve ever used — here in the sticks! Of course, this is a new satellite, probably lightly loaded while HughesNet is adding customers. The speeds probably will drop. Still, I’m counting on HughesNet keeping their 25 Mbps promise. HughesNet is boasting that this satellite service is the first satellite service to meet the FCC’s definition of broadband. So I think that there are regulatory reasons why HughesNet must keep the speed up if they want to advertise it as true broadband.

I hold an Extra-class amateur radio license. I’m accustomed to working with communications apparatus. One of the things that frustrated me, in trying to make do with Verizon Wireless, was the cheapness and flimsiness of the consumer-level electronic components. Piddly “air cards” are about the size of a thumb drive. Their antenna connectors (when they even have one) are tiny, fragile, and unreliable. By comparison, look at the photo below of the feedhorn on the HughesNet satellite dish. The feedhorn is nicely made at a commercial (as opposed to consumer) standard. It has a nice, snug, coaxial connector. Also notice the heat sink (the fins on the bottom). That means it gets warm. If it gets warm, that means there is some power in it. The installer said that the feedhorn operates on a 45 volts DC that is fed to the feedhorn on the coaxial cable.

Yup, we can stream video now. And I’m actually paying less than what I’ve been paying Verizon, keeping in mind that I had both a 3G and a 4G air card for Verizon, because the service was so unreliable that a backup was needed. The new backup method will be tethering the iPhone. But I’m hoping that this HughesNet service is going to remain both fast and reliable.


⬆︎ Ken buries the coaxial cable while the installer sets up the dish


⬆︎ The dish’s feedhorn


⬆︎ The installer used an app to aim the dish. The readout on the phone is coming from the satellite and represents the signal strength as seen from the satellite. This number rose to about 120 after the dish was properly aimed.


⬆︎ The system comes with one box, the HT2000W, which is both the satellite transceiver and the WIFI router.

Hoping for a peach crop

The peach trees in the abbey’s orchard are loaded with young peaches this year. Last year, the entire crop was killed by a late frost.

One of our friends who is a retired agricultural extension agent says that, unless you spray, you don’t get peaches. All sorts of insects prey on peaches, including fruit moths and peach borers. Today Ken gave the peach trees their first dose of reasonably organic pesticides — a spray containing a mixture of neem oil and a pyrethrin.

If the peaches survive the insects, then war with the squirrels, possums, and raccoons will be next.

Rain!


⬆︎ Baby apples

Drought is terrifying at any time of year. But drought in the spring, I think, is the worst. After a so-so start with the spring rains, a weekend front left behind 5.54 inches, and yesterday the sun came out. Now we can have some serious spring.

One of the things that is easy to see when you live in an undeveloped area with lots of wildlife is how drought means hunger for the wild things. During last year’s dry spring, for example, the deer wiped out the day lilies. They did it because they were hungry. The vole population is greater when there’s good rain. The moles flourish. Somebody — probably a raccoon but possibly a skunk — is making little divots all over the yard, orchard, and garden, taking advantage of the soft soil to dig for grubs.

Because there are many young trees at the abbey — including the orchard — good rain in the spring is important, because it’s in the spring that young trees do most of their growing. The surrounding woods also got a deep, deep watering, which will maximum the growth of the wild trees during the merry month of May. If good weather continues, the squirrels will have lots to eat this winter.

Ken’s garden is flourishing. Last night’s supper included mustard greens and roasted turnips. Cilantro pesto is on the menu for tonight. The onions are flourishing. The cabbages are forming heads. The basil and tomatoes are starting to jump.

The long-range forecast looks good. If the voles are happy, I’m happy.


⬆︎ The first fence roses


⬆︎ Spiderwort


⬆︎ Baby peaches, of which we have a great, great many


⬆︎ It seems that some red clover seed hitched its way in in a bag of grass seed. It’s a beautiful plant, so next year we should plant much more of it.


⬆︎ Wildflowers at the edge of the woods, the name of which I do not know

7-1

Ken has been playing in a hockey league in a nearby city. I went to my first hockey game last night. Ken’s team won 7-1.

Also, Ken is mentioned in a piece in the April 24 New Yorker. The New Yorker piece is about van dwelling and how it has been commercialized in social media. Ken provides the authentic element for the story, since he lived in his van not as an edgy Bohemian lifestyle but for a more practical and frugal reason — to afford grad school.

Location, location, location


⬆︎ Gragg, North Carolina, with Grandfather Mountain (altitude 5,945 feet) in the background

If you’re shooting a movie, shooting on location costs a lot of money. But if you’re writing a novel, good locations cost nothing. The author is limited only by what he can imagine and describe.

As a rule, I like for the locations in my novels to be places that I actually have been to and seen. Book 1 of the Ursa Major series, Fugue in Ursa Major, mostly because the story is just getting started, doesn’t stray very far from Phaedrus’ cottage in the Appalachian backwoods — places such as Charlottesville, Washington, and the national forests of West Virginia.

Book 2, Oratorio in Ursa Major, travels much farther — the coast and highlands of Scotland, an oil rig in the north sea, and an enormous space ship in deep space billions of miles from earth.

Book 3, Symphony in Ursa Major, which is in progress and which I plan to release next year, will get deeper into the Appalachians and will return to Charlottesville and Washington. But we’ll also go to London for some scenes at Westminster, and we’ll also go to New Delhi. And we’ll get even deeper into space and learn much more about galactic history and politics when we visit the galactic capital.

Back in the 1980s, on my first trip to London, my Welsh friend in London, who was a lawyer and policy wonk, wanted to impress me, so he requested tickets from his member of Parliament to visit Parliament on the prime minister’s question day. The prime minister was Margaret Thatcher. The tickets were for the sergeant-at-arms’ private box. So I have seen a good bit of Westminster, including of course the greatest abbey in the world, Westminster Abbey. And I’ve heard Margaret Thatcher getting rough with the opposition in the House of Commons. In my archives, I have a copy of the Times of London from the next day, which includes a story on what Thatcher was asked and what she said.

I was in Delhi in 1994, and though I have not seen the government buildings in Delhi, I’ve seen plenty of Delhi’s streets and markets including, of course, Connaught Place.

In Oratorio in Ursa Major, there is a brief visit to the place I call the Pisgah abbey. In Book 3, we’ll return to the Pisgah abbey. This place is deep in the Pisgah National Forest of western North Carolina. The abbey is imagined, but the location is real. I searched out the location using Google Earth. I was looking for a small clearing in a deep valley, surrounded by high mountains. I wanted a location reachable only by winding, treacherous roads. I settled on Gragg, North Carolina.

On a trip to Asheville last weekend, I went to Gragg. The place is so remote that GPS cannot be trusted. At one point, GPS wanted me to turn left on a nonexistent road that would have sent me crashing down a forested mountainside. But I finally found a way into Gragg by going to the little town of Linville. From Linville, GPS gave me a route down into Gragg on roads that actually existed. The road — narrow and unpaved with lots of one-lane bridges — looped and wound down a mountainside and gave up about a thousand feet of altitude in five miles. There is a small settlement of people at Gragg and even a small lake. Gragg seems to possess the only fairly flat parcel of land for many miles. The road to Gragg is so steep that, when I climbed back up toward Linville, my little Smart car stayed in 2nd gear (of five) for almost the entire drive.

Writers and readers know how important a story’s settings are. Writers and readers also know that, for some reason, stories just work better when the plot moves characters from place to place. When characters are in the middle of nowhere, the author is probably exploring the characters’ inner lives, their motivations, and their inner obstacles. But if the story deals with larger, planetary issues, then you can expect the characters to show up in places where planetary power is concentrated. In Symphony in Ursa Major, that will be Washington, London, and Delhi.

Many writers (and films) have imagined what a galactic capital might look like. In Symphony, I’ll have my go at that.


⬆︎ A resident of Gragg, with his hoe.


⬆︎ The Blue Ridge Parkway, one of my favorite roadways in the world.


⬆︎ Gragg viewed in Google Earth


⬆︎ Westminster

What’s growing at the abbey

⬆︎ Dogwood in the woods

⬆︎ Though we do see honeybees, these days bumblebees do much of the work of pollination.

⬆︎ Baby peaches

⬆︎ I always forget the name of this.

⬆︎ Baby chickens

⬆︎ It’s thrilling to see the woods coming alive. Looking down through the orchard toward the back of the house.

⬆︎ The wires that run along the top of the eight-foot fence needed replacing. For the top wire, we used copper wire and good insulators. The wire should serve as a reasonably good horizontal loop antenna for the low bands of amateur radio, including the 80-meter band. The loop is almost 400 feet long. That’s a long antenna.

The search for a lost heritage

Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, by Mark Williams, Princeton University Press, 2016. 578 pages.

Like many people who have worked hard to understand how our Celtic ancestors lived, I regularly grapple with a smoldering fury. No matter what thread to the past we try to follow, we find it broken. “Broken” is too weak a word. The thread wasn’t merely snipped cleanly in two. Entire centuries have been deliberately hacked from the record and have been lost to us. We owe a huge debt to scholars such as Mark Williams who spend their lifetimes trying to reconnect the threads.

From genetic testing, because I carry the genetic marker for the Uí Néill family (carefully studied because it’s a royal genetic marker and is common in Ireland), it can be said with high confidence that my ancestors were in Ireland (probably the north of Ireland) before Patrick. For that reason, I take very personally the cultural catastrophe that the church brought to Ireland.

In this book, Williams brings us up to date on what scholars of the written record can tell us about pre-Christian Irish history, insofar as Irish history can be deduced by studying the rich body of Irish literature that was produced from around 500 to 1400 A.D. The catch, though, is that this literature was produced in the church’s monasteries, in the centuries after Patrick. Though surely the literature contains some older, pre-Christian elements, no clear or consistent picture of the past can be reconstructed from it. The stories are muddled, often contradictory, and they have been polluted with Christian allegory and snippets that appear to have come from Bible stories. And obviously, for someone who was writing in, say, 1200 A.D., the trail had gone cold, because the Christian subjugation of Ireland was well under way by 500 A.D.

Like it or not, that’s where things stand. The Celtic people of Western Europe know next to nothing about their pre-Roman past because the Celtic past was systemically expunged and can be glimpsed now only through a Christian fog. Williams acknowledges that those of us who make an effort to reconstruct the Celtic past have no choice but to speculate. Williams seems to respect that speculation, but he wants the speculation to be grounded in a scholarship that is up to date.

He mentions a movement that began in the 1980s that he calls Celtic Reconstructionism. “Celtic Reconstructionists,” writes Williams, “have tended to ally subjective feelings with thoughtful investigations of the writings of classical authors, archaeology, and comparative Indo-European mythology.” That’s pretty much my method, so I suppose I am a Celtic Reconstructionist. Most reconstructionists, I think, are searching for a religious practice with which to replace the poverty of Christian theology. My purpose, on the other hand, is to make use of the Celtic past in my novels and to encourage people to think about how the world would be very different without the imperial Roman religion, which was imported from a little cult in the Middle East and which is based on very thin and very silly texts. In his notes, Williams even includes a link to the web site of a Celtic Reconstructionist in Scotland whose work he clearly respects. Here’s the link, for those who might like to follow up: Tairis: A Gaelic Polytheistic web site.

Sourdough rolls

Lately I’ve been making sourdough rolls. They’re almost as quick as yeast rolls, and almost as easy. It occurs to me that those of you who might like to get started with sourdough artisan breads, but who are concerned about the work and risk of “total bread failure” involved, might want to make sourdough rolls as a low-risk way of getting started.

I hope to make a video soon on quick-‘n’-easy sourdough rolls.

More Buffalo China

This blog gets a lot of visits from people who are interested in the history of Buffalo China. I would collect Buffalo china if I had anywhere to put it, but as things are I’ve collected only enough Buffalo china for the table, and no more than will fit in the kitchen cabinets.

But recently, while searching on eBay for more green-stripe cereal bowls (of which I have only four and need more), I came across an item that I had never seen before — cups and saucers with a dogwood pattern.

The seller, who is in Lenoir, North Carolina, said that the cups and saucers were from an old hotel in Lenoir, the Carlheim Hotel, which was torn down in, I believe, 1971. I don’t know for a fact that this china came from the Carlheim Hotel, but it seems very likely. Partly this is because the china did indeed come from Lenoir, and partly because dogwood is the state flower of North Carolina (as well as Virginia). It seems unlikely that Buffalo China would sell much of the dogwood pattern outside of North Carolina and Virginia. So I’m guessing that the dogwood pattern may have been custom china made for the Carlheim Hotel.

The china appears to be brand new. This stuff and its quality always amazes me.