Our RV Adventures

The big inrush of trucks for the flowback didn’t . . . inrush, I mean. Between 1pm and 6 pm, I had four vehicles come though the gate. And one of those four came in twice. So just three, really.

Jan had a few more, but two of them were at the wrong gate, and the rest were just the frack water guys running the pumps at the pond for the new frack up the hill.

Well, there’s always tomorrow. Or not.

So far we’ve dodged all the bad weather here with most of it staying to our northwest. And from the radar it looks like  that was a good thing. We’re forecast for 40% to 80% to 100% rain for the next five days so we’ll see how that plays out. I know the farms around here really need the rain, but it sure makes our job a lot messier.

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In what’s too perfect to be coincidental, for each of the last three days, and today’s on track to be a fourth, there have been exactly 100 failed logins each day. And it looks like the hackers are spreading out.

Where most attempts used to be almost all from Russia and Eastern Europe, now they’re more diverse, also coming from Sweden, Denmark, France, Spain, and other Western European countries

I’m looking at a couple of plugins that would allow me to block IP addresses by country, if necessary. But I would have to block wide areas since in most cases, login-attempt IP addresses are identical only at the first octet.

I’m sure most of you, (some of you?) have come across a reference to your IP address on the Internet somewhere along the line. Something like 31.22.48.0 (Albania), or 5.79.68.161 (The Netherlands). Every single computer on the Internet has an individual IP address, and in most cases, unless you’re trying to hide, that IP address can be traced back directly to you, or at least, your household.

So by ‘first octet’, I mean the first set of numbers of the IP address.

More than you really wanted to know, right? I know my friend Nick Russell’s eyes have already glazed over. But he’s just dreaming of flying kites and drones.

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Well, then, let’s talk about something more fun: Gate Guard Sewer Systems.

Todd, our GGS service guy, should be coming by tomorrow afternoon to bring us more diesel, and a new sewer pump.

The sewer pump is the small green barrel that sits out on the ground, and is where you hookup your rig’s sewer hose. It contains a macerator pump controlled by a float valve that shreds and pumps the waste up into the big green tank. The whole thing is pretty much a portable septic tank system.

IP address discussions are starting to sound better now, aren’t they?

Anyway, about a week ago, the GFCI on the 20amp outlet on our generator was popping every couple of days, and not for any reason I could find. Then it escalated to every day, and several times a day.

Two things are plugged into this outlet, the sewer pump, and the light stands. And I quickly discovered that if I left the sewer pump unplugged, the GFCI didn’t pop anymore. For now I plugged the sewer pump into the 30amp outlet on the generator which doesn’t have a GFCI on it. This should be OK since there’s nothing electrical exposed on the pump housing as it ‘s all inside the fiberglass tank. So no shock hazard.

Tomorrow’s Wal-Mart/ bring home lunch day, and she says ‘surprise her’.

Think she’d be ‘surprised’ if I didn’t bring home anything.

No, me neither.

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Thought for the Day:

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Jan talked to one of the Company Men this morning, and right now it looks like we’ll be here until our optimum leave date of November 22nd. Rather than the workover rig up next as we’d been told before, flowback is coming in the next day or so, with the workover scheduled for a couple of weeks from now.

And we’re back on the gate starting tomorrow morning at 7am, so our brief respite is officially over. But in one last gasp of fun, we decided on another dinner out tonight.

After our morning coffee I started in on replacing the charger port on my ASUS laptop. As I figured it took me a little over an hour to get down to the base circuit board where the port was located. Here’s a pretty good video of the procedure if you’re interested.

Next up was to get the old port unsoldered from the board, and that proved to be much easier said than done.

The tip of my soldering iron is only 1/32” in width, but I still had trouble getting the tip and the solder wick in between the port and the parts on either side. I finally ended up using a pair of sharp cutter to clip the legs off so I could get the port case out of the way and get to the circuit board traces to clean off the old solder.

This should have been easy, but it seems they used some sort of high-temp solder on this board because my 100 watt iron had a hard time melting the solder joints to clean out the holes. My iron had no problem melting the rosin core solder I was using, so I know it was working OK.

By melting my solder on top of the circuit board joints, I was able to gradually dilute the high-temp stuff and get it off and the holes cleaned out so I could mount the new port. But because I had to take my time with this so I didn’t overheat the board, it took me several hours to finish this up.

By now it was getting close to dinner time, and finding I didn’t have rubbing alcohol to clean the sticky rosin gunk off the board, I put it aside until after supper.

And as far as dinner, where else but the Longhorn Grill for another great steak. And afterwards we were going to split a piece of their delicious Strawberry Cheesecake, but apparently it was so delicious that they were sold out. So instead we split an order of their Hot Peach Cobbler with Ice Cream. Also very good.

Coming home we made a quick stop at the HEB for a few things, including rubbing alcohol. Back at the rig I got back on the laptop project, cleaning off the rosin with the alcohol and preparing the board for the new part. Then the real problem started.

Although the Amazon listing said this port was OEM for the X53E (and several other similar models), it did not fit my board. The lead spacing was slightly wrong, and the leads themselves were too big for the holes in the board.

So for right now, I’m stuck with my laptop in pieces until I can come up with a solution. I could try another Amazon listing from a different vendor, or I might be able to come up with a kluge using pieces of wire to make new legs, or maybe using sharp cutters to trim the leads down to fit the circuit board holes

But I’ll have to think on it overnight.

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Thought for the Day:

Knowledge is knowing how, Wisdom is knowing when.

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