Weird day. Another retrofit using clients gear. Added a Marantz NR14012 to drive the existing speakers. Odd though as when I showed up at 8 am, the wife informed me that her husband (whom I liked a lot) died last night at 7:30 pm. When I asked if she still wanted to move forward and if so, when she wanted to reschedule. She said, "No, I want you to do it. I just want it done." OK, awkward but, OK.

"I'll just need a check for $2,300."

Wow, that is a definite akward situation.

Wow! Awkward is an understatement!

Wow, Anthony. That's pretty outrageous.

Anthany, that is awkward.

Tonight,I fired a customer. Sucks but it had to happen :/

Care to share the details about the fired customer?

Spent all day on top of a scissor lift installing 20 PA speakers in a library. Thrilling stuff!

Yeah sad & awkward.

A few years ago I kept sending out a billing and leaving voice mails over a final payment. Finally wen to the house & well, you guessed it! He'd passed away.

Today I was installing some Ruckus WAPs. I love the fact that they have a zone director that does some wireless hand offs as you roam around and you can configure all the WAP from one device. They work great and I have been very happy with them until today, I did some creative swearing.

One of the WAPs was going in an attic. The electrician wired a few cat-5s and a couple of outlets in a few locations in the attic. I terminate and test the cat-5s no issues. Install the WAP, pick up my tools crawl out of the attic, blown cellulose insulation, shut off the light and close the hatch. I test the wireless signal and I am getting nothing from the WAP in the attic. I go back up open the attic, turn on the light and look at the WAP, it is powered and seems to be communicating. Crawl out of attic shut off light and close hatch, still no signal. I am sweating and getting frustrated. I go back into the attic grab the WAP and bring it to the rack room and plug it directly into the switch. It works fine in the rack room. I go back into the attic and re-terminate all the wire test it again and reinstall the WAP. Crawl back out of attic shut off light and close hatch, still no signal. I am at my wits end. I go up one more time, open the hatch and turn on the light and go to look at the WAP one more time. Again it looks fine. The status LEDs say it is connected and is transmitting. I crawl out of the attic but I am tired of shutting off the light and closing the hatch so I do not bother. I go down and test signal and it works, I do a happy dance and go down stairs and start cleaning up to leave for the day. I pick up, put the rolling rack back in its proper place and call it a day. I give things one test and all is well and works great. Go to walk out to my van and I realize I forgot to close up the attic.

I go back up to the attic and shut off the light and close the hatch. Just to make sure I give things one more test. NO SIGNAL! I think WTF it just worked 2 minutes ago, why not now. Then only thing that changed is I shut off the light and closed the hatch.

YUP, you guessed it, the electrician had put the designated WAP outlets on the light switch. It would work when I was up there but as soon as I killed the lights I killed the power to the outlets.

That's two hours I will never get back. Tough way to end a long week, but the homeowner loves the system.

Skipped the first day (hard to get away from family) but psyched for days 2 + 3 of Lollapalooza. Pretty Lights and Skrillex after show this evening, at the Congress. Up at 4:30A today, gonna be up 'til 5A. I need to find some coffee. :)

I got off of work a little early today! Woot! Drove 1/2 hour to fix a "locked up" MX980. One of the kids had somehow got one of the buttons stuck. I popped it out and it worked fine. Then I replaced an emitter on a DTV box where some genius DTV tech. managed to shred the wire on the existing emitter while swapping the boxes. WTF? Boom....off to the next job.

Dead 4 ch. modulator. Client does not want to spend the $$ to replace it without assurance that the new one will not break again in another 4-5 years. Really? But....even though he does not want to fix what is broken, he still wants DTV on the bathroom LCD. It was being modulated through the same modulator. Next job please?

Go to finish a final install we started on wednesday. We ran out of time because the "custom" cabinet they had built was totally awesome! And by totally awesome, I mean it sucked horribly! Who do these cabinet guys think they are doing a favor when they come up with the idea to put slide-out shelves in for ALL the gear? Certainly not me! I am sure he meant well right?

But it is always nice when you walk out of a job where nothing went wrong (other than the fancy cabinet), and the clients are smiling ear to ear and thanking you left and right! I did not even have any real issues with HDMI and HDMI control and ARC! Integra receivers and Panasonic plasmas seem to get along pretty good for this. Not so much with the SHarp LEDs we tried last week. But the ARC feature and the HDMI passthrough on the Integra do not coordinate very well. You turn on the TV, and the receiver thinks it needs to be on....which it should...sometimes....they need to give us more control over the specifics of HDMI control and how it behaves.....maybe in HDMI 1.9?

Anyway...it was a good day....and a pretty good week overall. Lots of service and maintenance visits. And I went out for sushi for dinner and ice cream after. Going to watch a scary movie now. Boo!

went fishing on the obx and drank beer...caught some nice speckled trout and a buzz.

Leaving for 5 weeks on Wednesday for Europe so being trying to get some jobs as far long as possible. Haven't picked up anything for the trip yet ha.

When did Bombardier start making speakers?:)
Very cool stuff!

Actually happened yesterday. (Sat.) A while ago I had installed a bunch of Cat6, RG6 and an HD antenna for a client that wanted to drop cable and get all his content from the internet. He was building his own computers with high powered graphics cards and solid state drives, putting 16 gig of RAM in them, etc.

There was some confusion about running the cable for his modem, I thought it was already in place, he thought I was moving it from one side of the fireplace to the other. I figure my bad for the confusion so I'll get the cable heated up and fished thru the chase to the other side of the fireplace.

Cut to the chase. Now getting no Internet at all,even from the cable he had run in front of the fireplace and was giving him Internet before I arrived. Tested cables, changed cables, took the jack out of the wall in case the new one was somehow bad. Booted and rebooted the modem and router. Finally took the modem into the attic and connected to the cable that ran to the demarc. NOTHING. So he finally calls the cable company......

Guess what?

They had started working on the lines about the same time that I had started hooking things up in his house. 3 hours. Sheesh. Go figure.