Wasted Years

Looking to end our work week on a fun note, me and Brad climbed up to the roof of The Seventh Level Of Hell towards the end of the day. Our objective was to setup a weather station that will be used to keep tabs on the weather and alert people when conditions outside are less than kid-friendly. It's a pretty cool setup - an integrated sensor suite with an attachable anemometer. If I had money to spend on frivolous gadgetry I'd buy one and stick it on my roof.

Oh what the hell, let's be honest - it's going to be used since not one administrator in our school district has enough sense to watch the weather forecast or stick their head outside to see how things are going to stay on top of their leadership role. Last winter was something of a debacle and they're looking for ways to avoid the pr nightmare they suffered through for several weeks.

Which is fine by me, because I get to play with cool stuff and climb on the roof.

The unit we have is wireless. It takes readings and sends them to a receiver that will be connected to a computer which eventually will run a script every time the temperature goes low enough to warrant action from our administrators and send out email alerts (Yeah... I'm wondering who's going to be the one scripting that... ).

Me and Brad haul all the stuff to the roof and start setting the unit up. We get to a part where we have to test the rain collector so I call down to The Fearless Leader to keep an eye on the receiver because he should be receiving some bogus rainfall data any second. He calls back with a big fat nada. We go back and forth a couple of times and I decide to run back downstairs and get the receiver and test it on the roof (actually, we probably should've tested it before leaving for the roof, but whatever). I get downstairs and TFL is looking at the receiver console with a 'WTF?!" look on his face. He shows it to me and the display is garbled with illegible gibberish. We cycle the power a couple of times with no luck.

I called up to Brad to let him know we were screwed for now and we packed it in. I think he's going to call the weather station's support line on Monday which means by Wednesday we'll probably have a replacement receiver, 3 spare receivers for our trouble, and two more weather sensor packages for the hassle of the phone call and it will all be free. Because that's what Brad does.

Outside of the chilling wind that picked up while we were topside and the failed attempt at getting the weather station set up it was actually a good end to the week.