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emergency bandwidth
Friday, October 3 2025
location: 940 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Today was the first remote-work Friday in my new(ish) job where I put in something close to an honest day of work. I was juggling several issues, all for remote clients reachable by different VPNs. As I worked, I had to flip back and forth between different VPNs to complete single tasks, partly because the only place to develop Crystal Report reports is on a virtual computer on our company's VPN (which is different from the clients' respective VPNs). There was also the problem of one VPN poisoning the ability to use other VPNs, the kind of thing that situation that usually results in a computer reboot. Reboots might seem simple to the people who designed Windows, who don't seem too aware that a computer that is up is a whole set of states in various windows, a set that is severely disrupted by a reboot. Even if it didn't destroy that set, it still destroys the undo history of every window, meaning you can't back out of things you've done. I say all this to draw attention to how much memory and organization is required to work in this workplace, and it's doubtful many people, including many skilled software developers, could do it. I don't think I've ever worked in such fractally-fractured workplace before.
At the end of the workday, I eventually found my way down to the dock, where Gretchen had spent much of the day. It was a gorgeous day, and Gretchen had even gone for a brief swim, though the water had been a little cold for that. I took the paddleboard out and stalked the loon, who is probably not an old loon but just the one we call "Throckmorton" as he gradually transitions to his winter plumage.
Later I returned to the work on building out Meshtastic functionality into my ESP8266 Remote Control system. The goal today was to get a Python script called meshtastic_bridge.py to actually send data to my existing backend (which currently gathers data from various ESP8266-based devices and tells them what relays to turn on or off). Part of what needed was a new column in my device table to hold the 64 bit unsigned integer corresponding to the unique ID on every LoRa-capable Meshtastic device. That way, when I sent this value as a manufacture_id to the backend, it could look up the device_id in my system and know how to tag the GPS (or other) data in the device_log table. I made pretty good progress on all of this, though I was not yet aware that the Python version of the encryption routine I'd created for ESP8266s in Arduino C++ that I'd had ChatGPT translate for me was wrong. But at some point my python script was at least acknowledging Meshtastic packets, which seemed huge at the time.
Meanwhile Gretchen and I were awaiting the arrival of Fern and her boyfriend Joshua from Boston. Traffic in Boston had been bad, and they were delayed, first by two hours, and then by two and a half hours. Within about fifteen minutes of their anticipated arrival, Gretchen offhandedly mentioned that Joshua, who is a master of an obscure martial art, needed to teach a class via Zoom the moment he arrived. Evidently Gretchen had neglected to consider any of the limitations of the cabin, including the fact that our bandwidth there is limited. And, for reasons I have yet to find, our bandwidth for this month was already almost exhausted; we were down to nearly our last gigabyte of our 20 GB monthly allotment. So in something of a panic, we both began the process of adding additional gigabytes to our allotment. Gretchen called Cricket customer support and I tried to do the same thing, first through the web, and when that didn't work, through the web. Cricket is a budget cellular provider, and it's times like this where that becomes obvious. Their website is useless, and Gretchen was told that the hold time was over a half hour. More effort seems to have been put into the app, though all I could figure out how to do was to change our hotspot plan from 20GB/month to 100GB/month (as opposed to simply adding gigabytes for this month). But we were desperate, so I just changed our plan, which will cost us $20 more per month until I change it back.
By this point, Fern and Joshua had yet to arrive, and it was obvious they must've somehow become lost. So Gretchen set out in the Bolt to find them. She was only gone about two minutes before Fern and Joshua arrived in Fern's old pickup truck (the one with a "SUBJECTIFY" sticker on the back). They'd completely missed Gretchen, who took another five or ten minutes of driving up and down Woodworth Lake Road before giving up and returning to the cabin. According to Fern, Google Maps had sent them to Lily Lake Road (over near Lake Edward), but it turned out that this was because she had abbreviated "lake" as "lk."
Once Gretchen got back and Joshua was done with the final fifteen minutes of the Zoom lecture he had to give (a colleague had been holding down the fort for the first 45 minutes) we all sat down to a proper meal at the dinner table. Gretchen had made a mushroom bolognese stew for us to eat with garlic bread, and Fern and Joshua had brought wine. I forget what all we talked about over dinner; all I remember thinking was that I don't much like Joshua. He comes off to me as cloyingly sweet, and none of the many stories he tells are interesting. This might be because I don't believe them. For example, he told the story about his uncle using a rope to tie him to a tree when he used to misbehave. Maybe it was true, but it didn't seem true, so my eyes glazed over as he was telling it.
The view from our dock late this afternoon. Click to enlarge.
The loon today. Click to enlarge.
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