Setbacks

Guess you have to take the ups with the downs. Things are going very well in the sense that we have a TON of places which are requesting service. The word of what we are doing has gotten out and the list is getting long. Problem is, there are only 5 of us here now. There is just NO WAY we can handle the number of requests we are getting. It’s frustrating to me not to be able to immediately provide service to these people who need it so badly. The good news is that I have requested reinforcements of up to 50 people which will hopefully be here within a week. The idea is to create 8 sub-teams, each responsible for a specific city/region. Since a lot of work comes from word-of-mouth requests, these people will become familiar with their area and its specific needs. There’s just no way we can handle this work alone. Especially since I’m supposed to be "coordinating" things, and have ended up spending most all of my days out doing installs. This gives me less time to track and coordinate with other groups working in this region, which should be my primary job. There are about 6 sites I hope we can get online in the next 2 days, otherwise we’re going to look pretty bad to these people. We’re also moving. The family we were staying with needed to make some important family decisions, and it was hard for them with us there. We packed up and left this morning, and are currently staying in another RV behind our NOC. This is temporary, since 50 people can’t stay there. We’re working on getting accommodations at a Navy Seabee’s (CB’s) base nearby. Should have something worked out in a couple of days. This will enable us to have everyone in one place, making inter-team communication easier. I’m going to require a nightly briefing where each team can give a status update and we can update the project status as a whole. The idea is to be able to dynamically reassign resources to scale the teams’ size and abilities as necessary. There is a large area to cover with limited resources. Hopefully this structure allows us to do this. We’ve encountered a couple of network problems as well. Our main backhaul to the area serving us is picking up a lot of interference suddenly. Hopefully Ryan (our Network Architect) can get out there early tomorrow and take a look at it. I have to complete a network map in the near future as well. I may have some open questions to the more technical of you, so stay tuned! FINALLY, we hear there’s another hurricane headed our way. Bring it.

- Matt (tired)