Good Morning All. I am James, also known as exlrrp
this is the Saturday Morning Home Repair Blog where the Dailykos community gets together to talk about all things construction and repair. Our genial and expert staff stand ready to aid you on your every problem
Good morning all.
today I have a home improvement Ive been waiting over a year to do. The reason I have waited a year to do this is through because I wanted to wait for just exactly the right moment.
And this is it.
Harken back to yesteryear, or actually 2005. Brave settlers in Oregon are moving into their homestead and discover the phone landline only allows 28bps. After trying this for a very short while and finding it leaves much to be desired, the brave settlers came up with Hughesnet satellite internet. The Hughnesnet man comes out and the only place he thinks will work for it is right dead in front of the living room window looking out at the best view.
This is , of course, a 4' wide satellite dish with various sticky outty things that take up a large proportion of our view out the living room window. AAKK!! Oh well, thats progress.
But the dam thing never worked well, always going out, at least once a week. I could not put out a regular diary if I had to rely on it. Any weather deviation, or no weather deviation, would knock it out, sometimes for days. In the 6 years we had it we had to have the repair guy out 5 times. Each one, of course, blamed all the trouble on the previous guy and said HE had it fixed now. Each time it would start effing up again shortly thereafter and I'd have to contact the service number in Pakistan. ("Oh yeah like your name is really Mary Lou").
It got so we were looking for just about anything different and one day I was walking through a mall when I was accosted by a person in a Verizon kiosk who told me all about this Mobile Hotspot thing that was supposed to work perfectly. So I tried it---and its worked almost perfectly since then. I love it! it works every time!!
This is a small little thing the size of a a very small cell phone. It sits in the living room and takes the place of the satellite disc, the router and a whole spaghetti of wires. Its also the wifi. It works great. The only thing is, about every 2 weeks, for some reason you have to turn it off and on to reset it. Thats it!! Compare to having to go out and scrape off ice and snow when its icy and snowy.

And it works much better. With the router there were blank spaces in the house where you couldn't get reception. Now there's no blank spot, you can take the laptop out on the lawn if you want. One of the nice things is the Hot Spot is rechargeable and portable, you can take it wherever you want---this is the thing to use in an RV for instance.
Its also $10/month cheaper than Hughesnet when added to our Verizon bill
Oh frabjous day, calloo callay!!So there I am all happy and elated but I still have a huge disc, which I own now, right in front of my house.
What to do, what to do.
Today was the day!
Here's what it looked like before

The "during" shot. One breaks out the remodeling tool, a Dewalt 18v sawzall, w/ metal cutting blade, one turns it on, one attacks the metal pole at the bottom.
BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ!!! TIMBER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One relaxes, enjoying a cool drink, knowing one has improved ones abode enormously once again.One pats oneself on the back, another successfull remodeling project accomplished.

I'm saving the parts from the disc to make a transmogrifier for my front gate, giving me the capacity to tranmogrify solicitors and trespassers into harmless pieces of waste material, to be recycled of course.
Saturday Morning Home Repair Blog begins now!