Lopez Family blog

When it comes to life changes there are two schools of thought, do them one at a time or get them all in at once. Getting them done one at a time gives you time to assimilate the change before a new change comes along. A friend of mine believes in the other theory, that of many changes all at once. She feels that if you are going to make changes in your life, you might as well make them all at the same time to just get them over with. We, as a family, find ourselves in the midst of some life changing events that have us testing out that second theory first hand.

Our second daughter was born two weeks ago and as of this past Friday I no longer work at Gomez, the place I have worked at for the last four years.

Life at home with two little ones is not something to be taken lightly. I’d forgotten how hard it is to only sleep two hours at a time and then try to go on about your work day. One thing that I have noticed is that Gabriela seems to sleep a lot better and is able to tolerate a lot more noise than Natalia ever did. Which is good given that Natalia, who is just over two and and a half, has a voice that only comes in one volume setting… really loud!

When Natalia was born we used to think that we had no time for anything else other than taking care of her. Now that Gabriela is here, we realize how much time we did have to ourselves.

And while the home life seems to be getting settled, the work life is in full flux.

Lisa is applying for new jobs and I have a new job.

I have had a great time at what is now my old job. I’ve met great people who have thought me a lot, both personally and professionally. Four years ago when I first applied to work at Gomez, most people had never heard of it, and to be honest neither had I. It was a small 80 person company that monitored the internet. Four years on Gomez had gone on to become the leader in web application monitoring and is now part of a 5000 people corporation called Compuware.

During my time at Gomez I made many friends and came to admire many people, none more than Bill Scerra who thought me so many things, primarily how not to travel, you can read that story here.

We’ll see how the new work life works out, so far I’ve been at home reading about the company’s history and doing the overall background learning necessary for my job. Once I start going into the office we will really see how life will change. I’m sure no matter what, we’ll work out a way to keep having the great family life we’ve had so far as well as keeping our careers going.

A few months ago we changed our internet provider from cable to fiber optic. This change was mainly due to our unhappiness with the cable provider. The service from the cable company was fine for the most part, even if the connection speed topped out at 5Mbps for download. What made us want to change provider was the ever increasing costs of the service, every month there was an increase of about $1.00 hidden in mysterious fees.

Around that same time Fiber Optic service was new in our area and was offering pretty good deals. We ended up changing to a bundle deal which not only saved us money but we also now have a top download speed of around 20Mbps.

We had to wait a few days for installation but when the day came the FiOS technician installed everything in a matter of a couple of hours. Excitedly I tested my work laptop, which has Windows XP, both wired and wireless and got 20 – 21 Mbps download speeds. I used Speedtest to measure the download speeds, but there are other sites that will do the same. I also tested our Power Mac G4 (yes, I know it’s a dinosaur) which was wired directly to the wireless router that was provided, an Actiontec MI424WR. The speeds for the Power Mac were also close to 20Mbps so all was well, we had fast internet.

Only it wasn’t, Lisa’s Mac Mini had a painfully slow internet connection and the TiVo was also suffering from some of the same. At first I thought that it could be due to the fact that they were both in the room furthest from the router. But the room isn’t quite that far and I could get 20Mbps on my work laptop’s wireless.

I thought of many ideas on how to improve speeds in the living room so that the whole family could take advantage of the full 20Mbps. I considered running wires to the living room, which wouldn’t have been easy because we have a crawl space under the living room to which I’ve no idea how to get to. I also considered buying some of those power line Ethernet adapters, but the idea of using our electrical wiring wasn’t too appealing since it’s pretty old and I wasn’t sure how it would hold up or if we’d get better connection speeds.

Then I remembered my old Linksys WRT54G which was just in a bag somewhere in the basement. I couldn’t connect it directly to the entry point since the service comes into the house via coax cable so I had to still us the Actiontec router as the entry point. I plugged the Linksys to the Actiontec router and turned of the Actiontec’s wireless. I changed all our computers and the TiVo to use the Linksys wireless.
I tested with my laptop to make sure I was getting the same speed as before and then I tested with Lisa’s Mac. Surprisingly that change made the whole difference, Lisa’s computer was now getting 20+Mbps and the TiVo is able to stream content from the internet without any choppiness.

Just out of curiosity I had both routers with the wireless turned on and sitting next to each other. I tested using the Actiontec’s wireless from Lisa’s computer, and got the expected 5Mbps download. I then connected the Mini to the Linksys router and got 21Mpbs.

So the moral of the story, if you have FiOS, get rid of the Actiontec router and use one that will allow you to take advantage of the full potential of your connection. If you want to try it yourself I found these two guides helpful Using a Linksys Router with Verizon FiOS and Making an Actiontec MI424-WR a Network Bridge.

I recently had to do some research for an article on mobile web performance, so I looked up stats on mobile phones and mobile web applications. There were several angles to it, the website, the phone that was being used to reach the website and the carrier the phone used to access the Internet.

Among the things I found in my research was the fact that Nokia phones are the most popular mobile phones in the world, something like 40% of the world’s mobile phones are Nokia, just for some reference, iPhones make up 13% of the world’s mobile phones (Click here to see the report). Surprisingly when looking at phones that are used to access the internet it’s very close between Nokia and iPhone. Stat Counter is a great place for that sort of information.

Ok so you’re probably thinking that it’s not big news that the iPhone is close to being the most popular phone for accessing the web. But what I did find interesting was the fact that some web applications are aimed at particular browsers/devices. So if the visitor is using an iPhone they get one version of the application, if they use a Nokia they’ll get a different version, if you’re using your home computer yet another, etc., etc.

This sounds like a good thing, but, consider the fact that the iPhone runs a full browser but uses phone carriers to get it’s data. This means that a full application is being passed on to the phone via what is the equivalent of a DSL connection. The image of camel through eye of needle comes to mind.

I can’t go into detail of the findings since the article hasn’t been published yet but the last bit that I’ll share is that out of the four carriers that I used in my study, Sprint was the fastest and T-Mobile was the slowest. The other two were Verizon and AT&T.