Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I woke up late today and wasn’t feeling 100%. I slowly got ready for work and then decided that it would be best to stay home today. A lot of people are going to be off-site for the analyst conference anyway and I have no meetings. I called Carole and left her a voice mail indicating that I wouldn’t be in the office today.

Indeed, throughout the day I only had two work emails. It must have been pretty slow today. Close to the afternoon I saw that Casey did a couple of builds. Unfortunately he did them out of order so I’ll have to work with him tomorrow to get that fixed.
I did some work in the living room. I put the shelves inside the media towers where the rear speakers sit. I also brought up all of my CDs and put them on the shelves of the tower. I ordered them alphabetically by album.

While I was doing this, Jen came over. I finished up my work and spent some time with Jen.

We had dinner together in the dining-room. It’s really cool to have my own dining room with a table and everything. The novelty of that still hasn’t worn off on me.

After dinner Jen did homework in the dining-room and I worked on my laptop next to her. She complained of slow WiFi speeds and I observed the same thing. The access point isn’t too far away. In fact, it’s only about thirty yards away on the same floor. It sits underneath the bookshelf in the living room.

I was pretty frustrated at this so I decided that I would be clever and construct my own external antenna for the wireless router - how hard could it be? This turned out to be a bad idea.

The external antenna connector is a tiny hole on the back of the router. I tried to ‘fit’ a wire into that hole. It didn’t stay no matter how much I tried to force it. Eventually I gave up.

The whole time I was running netstumbler on the laptop sitting in the Dining room. When I went back to the dining-room to re-join Jen, I noticed to my horror that the signal strength from the access point is now greatly reduced from before I started screwing with it!

So not only was I unable to fix the problem but I ended up making it worse. Instead of letting it go, I continued to obsess over the problem. My stereo came with an AM antenna (plastic, round-looking thing with two wires). The wires looked thin enough so I tried to attach it to the external antenna connector on the access point. As I touched the wire to the connector, I saw a huge spike in signal strength. Unfortunately the wire wasn’t small enough to fit in the connector.

I played around with it and got it to the point where the wire would barely stick inside the connector but it couldn’t be moved or touched as it would fall out. This was at least better than the awful performance I had before. I got online and looked at possibly buying the ‘official’ omnidirectional indoor antenna. It’s about $30.

After this ordeal I was pretty worked up and Jen offered to give me a massage. It felt great.