A productive weekend

2014-01-06 00.08.33Yesterday morning, someone from Prim came to pick up our laundry. It really was nice to spend the weekend without a huge pile of laundry to do.

In addition to outsourcing laundry, I have been thinking about trying Instacart or Amazon for grocery delivery, but yesterday I decided to go to the grocery store after a run. I regretted it. I spent about 40 minutes in the grocery store, and then I had to haul four bags up Potrero Hill to our house.

I think I’ll try grocery delivery next time. There was one advantage to shopping in the store. I think walking around the food really jogs my memory, and I got everything that was on my list. I also thought of a few things I decided we needed, but that I hadn’t put on the shopping list earlier. I’m not the sort of shopper who buys a lot of food we won’t eat, so in that respect I do well shopping in the store.

On Friday, our cable was installed. We got a 55 Mbps connection from Astound, and we’ll see how quickly we start having to pay extra bandwidth fees. I love sonic.net, our previous ISP, but Sara likes to watch a lot of Korean drama on streaming video, and it was buffering all the time. We were getting about 4.3 Mbps from sonic.net DSL. Apparently their DSL can be as good as 20 Mbps, but we’re too far from the CO: about 7000 feet. Interestingly, I got the best speed I ever saw from sonic.net — just over 5 Mbps — the day our cable got connected.

After our cable was connected, I was getting about 55 Mbps over Ethernet, but only 18-20 or so over wireless. Eventually, I tracked down the source of the slowness: a wireless printer that only uses 802.11b/g. We’d have to get that off the network if we wanted to see decent speed in the house. Sara was happy with 18-20 Mbps — she could watch Korean drama — but I wanted the full 55.

Our apartment is long and skinny, as many San Francisco flats are: it’s about 25′ wide and about 50′ long. Because we’re planning on turning what is now a study and junk room into JH’s bedroom, I put the wireless in the living room, in the front of the building. That meant the network no longer stretched into our bedrooms. Since someone might want to watch streaming video in bed, I ended up having to upgrade our wireless network, too, adding a repeater in the middle of our apartment, so we get connectivity in the bedrooms.

Unlike our old router, our new router creates three networks: a 2.4 Ghz one, a 5 Ghz one, and a guest network. This meant I could extend just one of the networks, slowing it down but increasing its range, while leaving the other two nice and fast. I noticed that our wireless printer was slowing down our old network as well, so I wired that to the repeater.

It’s working pretty well. The two fast networks are getting pretty close to the full 55 Mbps. The extended network is slower, but the speeds are tolerable: 6-8 Mbps in the back bedrooms and 15-20 in the front of the apartment.

This morning I made the to-do list at the beginning of this post, and we managed to get pretty much everything done. I haven’t done many to-do lists on paper, but I think it was a really good way to go, at least for a one-day list.


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