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Blizzard of 2017
Tuesday, March 14 2017
There was already over a foot of snow on the ground this morning when I got out of bed (which was, by the way, after 10:00am). It continued falling until late in the afternoon, accompanied by stong winds which tended to pile it up in drifts on the ground and blow the rooftops and treelimbs mostly clear. For this reason, it was impossible to say for sure how much fell. On the ground near the house it ranged from 17 inches near the front door to over three feet just east of the cars.
Gretchen, the dogs, and I kept inside most of the day, though Gretchen somehow encouraged the dogs to go outside briefly during the worst of the storm at around noon. Ramona immediately went back inside, but Neville humored Gretchen enough to make it half way to the Farm Road, pissing in the snow, and then bounding back to (and through) the door. The snow was so deep that getting through it was a major chore, and later when Gretchen walked to the mailbox and back via the still-unplowed Farm Road, the 775 foot roundtrip took about ten minutes (something she realized due to a baking project happening in the kitchen at the same time).
Gretchen made a festive day of the blizzard, baking a loaf of bread and pressure-cooking some kidney beans. We also began the day as though it were, well, a Wednesday, with a french press of decaf consumed in front of a roaring fire. We'd gotten out of bed so late in the morning that I had to do my usual remote-workplace morning fart-around on a Chromebook in the living room.
By late in the afternoon, one of the tenants at the brick mansion had emailed Gretchen to complain (in an uncharacteristically snotty way) about all the snow at the house and the lack of shoveling going on. The complainer in this case was the oldest resident of the house, and at 60 she was obviously not the one to be shoveling, though she apparently had tried. The problem was that the woman living at the house who was supposed to do the shoveling was supposedly still recovering from a fractured leg bone she claims to have gotten from a fall in the basement. Once Gretchen realized this month-old leg fracture was still preventing snow shoveling, she immediately got into high gear, calling our friends to find out who they use for plowing and/or shoveling. She also called various services, some of which were better at calling her back than others. It having been the biggest snowfall in over ten years, it was hard to find anyone available. But eventually Gretchen scared up a couple possibilities. She got off the phone with one snow shoveling guy and declard, "If he shovels out [the brick mansion] for $50, I will suck his dick!" Later, though, this guy proved to be a bit on the shady side, at least according to our tenant who would've been shoveling the snow had her leg not been broken; she overheard him talking with some of his henchmen. He was clearly trying to extract as much money as he could ($100) with the knowledge that Gretchen was desperate (and maybe he didn't know about the extras she was willing to throw in). In the end, most of the shoveling got done by a relative of the broken-legged tenant, with some additional work done by a professional who only charged $30.
Meawwhile I'd taken a break from my workday to do some shoveling around our house. I shoveled out to the cars and managed to shovel through a deep drift to and begin a path towards the road. But the snow wasn't just deep; it was also heavy, and I could tell I was never going to clear the driveway in a reasonable time without killing myself. So Gretchen arranged to have someone come and plow us out. But he wouldn't be able to get here until tomorrow.
This evening, I made great progress on a project I'd mentioned doing some research for yesterday: the installation of the DD-WRT open-source firmware onto various compatible routers. I've had two models that the developers who produce DD-WRT versions had taken awhile to get to, and even now, it turns out there are firmwares hidden away on dd-wrt.com that cannot be found with its search engine and must instead be found by browsing through a hierarchical folder structure, which I never would've known to do until I watched a YouTube video. Even knowing the names of the files isn't enough to find them with Google; you have to do the work of drilling through the hierarchy as if it were 1992. The result in a beta-version of DD-WRT on my TP-Link TL-WR1043ND, but that's perfectly fine for me. It installed great, with a minimum of fuss.
I had more trouble installing a DD-WRT firmware onto an ASUS RT-N66R (a model name that looks to me like sublimated racism). I'd tried this once in the past and thought I'd bricked it, so I'd immediately sent it back for a refund. This time I was careful to do my research and follow all the necessary procedure. In the course of all this, I learned about a program called the Asus Firmware Restoration, which seems to be an essential part of any DD-WRT firmware flashing. This is partly because more recent copies of official Asus firmware prevent the installation of open-source firmwares, but it's a limitation Asus Firmware Restoration ignores. Had I known about Asus Firmware Restoration, I probably could've unbricked my last ASUS RT-N66R.
My third and final DD-WRT installation was onto that Linksys WRT54GS I'd gotten for almost nothing at the Tibetan Center. These squat blue boxes were the first routers for which open source firmwares became available, so it was no surprise when the installation gave me no difficulties whatsoever. There's been so much hacker focus on Linksys routers that people have found ways to add serial ports, SD cards, and even USB ports to them. This means they have most of the functionality necessary for project that might otherwise be suited to a headless Raspberry Pi. (Happy Pi Day!) I now have seven routers with DD-WRT installed on them, though only one ("Katydid") is in service, mostly as a Network Attached Storage server. It could be the basis for quite the solar-powered mesh network.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170314 feedback
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