The inverter/charger does not work, but good news. They are sending me a new one with a remote. When I get it, I will test it and ship the bad one back.

This is good news. I should be up and running soon with a good battery backup system.

So, now I just hope that the power output on it is good enough for my computer equipment. It should be fine. The power supplies on the computers should be good enough to handle it.

One thing I don't understand... Why isn't there 12VDC power supplies for computers. It would be so much easier if there were some. I could just hook up all my PC's to deep cycle batteries without the need of a inverter. 24VDC power supplies would be the best.

See, the point is that PC's run on 12VDC and 5VDC. So we convert from 120VAC to 12VDC. It would be much better to convert from 24VDC to 12VDC. There would be less heat in the power supply for one thing.

I'll look again for some. That may be the best answer to the problem of backup power.

Hello All,

I had a great holiday last weekend. We spent Saturday through Monday in Twain Heart for the Fourth of July.

Sunday we went to the lake. It was awesome. We had the jet boat there with the wake-board. I gave it a try and actually got up on the thing. Took four tries. It's not really that hard to stay up, but it's very hard to get up.

We had a great time. Good food and good company. It was all good.

Well, now it's time to get back to work and I have a lot of it.

I received my Inverter/Charger yesterday. I hooked it all up, but I could not get it to turn on. I'm thinking that there may be something wrong with it. I'm going to triple check my wiring today and make sure things are setup right.

They did give me a 30 day exchange warranty on it. So I can send it back for replacement if needed. I sure hope it works. I've had a bad week already, and I don't need any more stuff going wrong.

What a day today.

First thing in the morning I went back to Lowes to exchange the cooler. The only bottom draft ones were on the very top shelf. So it took them about an hour to get them down.

Then the bank had to verify my CC so that I could buy it. I guess some fraud flags came up. I had to go over all the info and passwords and stuff to get it working. Anyway....

I get home, open it up, start to get things together and find out that I bought the wrong one again! I bought the next size up. It's way bigger than the old one. So this one won't work on the roof since the hole is bigger.

I did not want to go back to Lowes again. Twice is too much. So we built a frame for the cooler to set on the ground. I bought some air ducting and attached it to the cooler. Then we built a window mount so we could pump the air into the house through a window.

We finished it up just as the wind came back, and it's up and running. But there is a problem. It does not cool the house like expected. The old cooler would cool the house from 90 to 65 in an hour. This one ran for hours and hours and the house is still in the 80's.

The old one really blew the air out. This one is just a slight breeze. I think that the motor that I have is too small. I guess I'll have to buy a new motor now also. ARG!

So now I don't know what to do. This kinda sucks. Actually, it really sucks. What a week.

It finally happened. At 10:30PM almost exactly. We were hit by a whirl wind. The kind like in the photo's in a previous entry. It blew our front door open and filled the house up with dirt. It blew the fan out of the back window and fill the bedroom up with dirt.

But the worst thing is... It blew our water cooler off the roof and smashed it. $500 down the drain.

I might be able to fix it, but I'm not sure. It's really messed up. I really didn't want to put it on the roof. I should have took it down months ago. All well.

At least it went off the back of the roof and didn't hit any of our cars.

This sucks.

Well, It's my birthday today!

Yesterday I went out and swapped the tires from my truck to my Samurai. I also put new shackles on the leaf springs. This lifted my Samurai just a bit more off the ground and also gave me a lot more traction.

The only problem came when we found the front tires rubbing on the front bumper. So out came the Sawzall. First I cut just a bit off the bumper. Then we noticed that the problem was actually the bumper mount. Since it's welded onto the frame.... Well... Sawzall time again.

I cut about 8 inches off the bumper mount so the tires would not rub when turning and compressed. Because of this, I don't have a front bumper any more.

I'm planning to cut 45's in the tubing then weld the bumper mounts back on. Then I'm going to fabricate a whole new bumper for my Samurai. I've got the plan, and I just need the metal.

Another thing that I found out was the tow bar that is attached to the front was welded on! It's a bolt on part, but someone welded it. All well... I have a grinder... The reason I want to take it off is because it hits the ground on steep transitions. So off it goes.

So, I got my Samurai running, and we took it for a test drive. We went over by the river to the off road race track. They had been racing their lately, so it was really cut up. It was really fun too. Craig even got high centered and I had to pull him off with my little truck. It was a blast.

The IPTables-P2P seems to be working out. So far no problems. I have not seen any P2P connections. I have not had any calls asking about it also, so...

Things are still really busy around here. I'm just trying to keep up. Too many things going on around here.

The wireless network seems to be stable now. I've got about 3 days uptime on it. I will work some more on the NoCat Authentication stuff later. I still don't have usernames/passwords working. It's just running as a Open system with a Login button.

I have two more major projects to do after that. VPN server and new email server. But I only have the weekends to work on them. They will get done....eventually.

I thought that my site needed a bit more green in it. So I added more green. Notice the cool translucent header. CSS/PNG's are cool.

Last night I found a new Fast Track blocker (Kazaa and friends). It's called IPTables-P2P, and it's hosted on Source Forge. I was trying to get FTWall to work, but it's DOCS are terrible. In the help forum someone posted the link to IPTables-P2P.

The install was very easy. Just compile the kernel module and install it. Then setup a IP Tables rule to pass packets to it.

It's running, I guess. I'll find out tonight when the P2Pers get online and start trying to kill my bandwidth.

I sure hope this works. Every night at around 5PM I start getting complaints of slow connections. I look at the files and see someone just killing all my bandwidth using some P2P app. So I have to manually blackhole them. I hate to do it, but when they are causing everyone else to go slow I have to do something.

With IPTables-P2P I can just kick back and it will block only the P2P apps. I'll find out tonight.

What a day. What a week. I hate doing upgrades. Always a million problems. So I'm still having lots of people with problems getting online. It really bugs me to no end. It's days like this that I just don't want to signup any more customers.

Most of them are back up and running. There is one that had his equipment fired from a black out. I'm fixing him up tomorrow... I think. That's the third blowing out radio this week. I think I figured out the problem with my last customer that was having problems getting online. Bad radio. I'm going to test it out to make sure.

In other news, the people that are actually online are saying that everything is really fast. I like to hear that.