Skypefeast!

I got to Skype with Matt today!!

At last, the stars aligned, and I was able to get my dad, Loretta, and Matt over to Loretta and Matt's place for a somewhat choppy Skype session. We resolved to meet around noon their time, 10 PM my time, and though it connected, it was pretty much unusable. We postponed for a couple hours, and at 2 PM their time, midnight my time, it worked considerably better. It is still not very good quality, but even video that updates once every couple of seconds is fine with me. I can also hear them just fine, but apparently my voice isn't getting through, so I resorted to typing what I wanted to say, and just listening the other way around. Not perfect, but it's a start!

I also got a headset for the XBox in the mail from my brother, and we were able to talk via XBox Live, which is really intended to set up gamers with each other to play games. It just so happens that being able to talk to each other was a valuable enough feature that it is included, and my roommate has an XBox 360 he barely uses now that he's beaten the only 2 games he brought with him.

Chasing the Jackal

I can Skype.

I've actually waited about four months to say that! I finally got an antenna rig for the one ISP on Camp Victory, "Jackal", that allows you to use programs like Skype, BitTorrent, online gaming, and some other less savory yet high-demand online services. The one that I had been using, "Magic Island" or "MIT" (Magic Island Technologies), worked much like you might use a hotspot in a Starbucks - they have wireless access points all over the place, and if you are close enough to one, you connect, pay, and surf. The trouble is, MIT is in bed with the military, and it polices what you do on the network. In the case of the less savory things you can do online, it is to be expected, but they also cut off Skype, gaming, and other fairly benign things in the name of security and conservation of bandwidth. Despite this odious policy, since you don't need a crazy antenna to get their service, they get a lot of users who aren't willing to go on an epic quest to connect.

The antennas are available as they come into country, and you have to sign up with Jackal before they will order one. For $150 ($75 deposit, $75 for the antenna to keep as long as you need), you get on a waiting list that is at least a month long. When it comes in, you have to find some kind of mast, pole, or long piece of wood to mount it on, then set it up to point to one of several Jackal motherships. I was able to get one secondhand for $100 (but it's not eligible to be returned for its deposit ...), complete with a sturdy metal mast and a fairly long cable. I thought the guy who sold it to me lived only a couple housing units down from mine, so I asked my roommate Bob to pick it up for me on his day off - the guy selling it was trying to get out of Dodge quick (no pun intended - I live in a housing area called "Dodge City North"). It turned out he lived more like 20 housing units away. It'll take a few more weeks to live that one down.

Hopefully I can start getting into the weekly Skype routine everyone has been running for several months now!

Of course, pictures always help ... here are some of the install:

This is the antenna itself, known as a "Subscriber Unit" (it's WiMax technology). The guy who sold it to me gave me the metal pipe it is attached to as well.

We set it up to lean against the 12-foot concrete walls that surround our housing unit (bottom right). I used nylon cord to attach it to the concrete wall; there are a couple of rebar loops built into the wall to allow forklifts to manipulate it.

There wasn't much room between the wall and the housing unit for me, let alone the ladder ... oh well, war is hell.

Bob, watching me risk my life on the ladder from the ground, still not amused about having to carry the immense metal pole a quarter mile (or more)!

That's it! We ran the cord from the wall (in the background) to our window, and we got unrestricted Internet!

One-way conversations

Well, another frustrating day of trying to use the Internet here. A lot of stuff works just fine, but the stuff that does not work utterly does not work - in this case, I need to post something for school and can't. Then there are the endless reply-all emails we all know and love, one of which I was sucked into a couple days ago and which is still gaining momentum. I know I can send email successfully, but the message is just not getting through. It's a day of one-way conversations ...

The first one-way conversation I had today was on this reply-all email. It's really not kosher to divulge the content of the email, but suffice to say I explained some technical details about the network we're monitoring over here to some people with a complaint, and they responded saying that they agreed with me but continued with the complaint like I had not said anything at all. If you agree with my explanation, they why would you continue to complain that no one knows why your problem exists? I know why their problem exists, and I can tell you it's not technical ...

I also tried to access my grad school's online learning system - basically a modern day incarnation of a bulletin board where people post long threads of discussion, readings, assignments, and Byzantine grading systems that take into account whether you responded to something within a certain amount of time or not, how long your response was, and most insidiously, what the quality of your response was. I think before we reduce quality to such a trivial role, we might take a lesson or two from Robert Pirsig about how this website is leading us to our goals of enlightenment. I said I tried to access it because I was only partially able to access it - apparently I can read but not write from the recreational network we have access to in our housing units. That's just great, now I get to work on school from the building where I am on shift!

There's really no good way to get Internet access out here - you can spend the money on your own personal satellite dish and access plan ($thousands, but good), buy the commercial ISP-provided stuff ($tens, but see above for how satisfying it is), walk 20 minutes and use the education center's Navy-run separate network ($free, just very inconvenient and often maxed out), or if you are lucky enough to have it at work, just use that ($free but monitored, and you get drive-by taskings since you're still at work when you use it). All of these options are riding satellite links that are the best we can do, but really not all that good. I guess that should make me thankful I have the last couple options, right? Some guys out here don't even have that; their network access consists of a couple hardened plastic cases and a wire to whatever radio gets the signal to a larger radio and more plastic cases.

At least I have the ability to post to the blog!