Monday, February 29, 2016

Key West - Taxes, not all vacation

A night scene along Duval Street
At least you can get all your tax forms downloaded from the web now. Of course there's TurboTax but what you really need are all the forms required for input (W-2s, 1099s, etc.). Every site had their forms online except one. Since we're not at home until June, it's important to get the online versions. So I downloaded the latest version of TurboTax from Amazon (is there nothing they don't carry?) I think 90% of the boaters here depend upon Amazon deliveries, often it's cheaper than buying anything locally, especially with Amazon Prime membership where 2 day delivery is free.

The parking is terrible, many just rent a bike for their stay
So after an exciting morning of doing taxes it was time for a walk. The weather is holding true to warming up so we admired the flowers coming out and the warm sun. I reset my Xfinity modem so the WiFi signal was channel 4 instead of the universally popular chanel 11. Doing a scan with one of my programs I found 15 WiFi stations on channel 11, the same channel my Xfinity modem WiFi was set to. There are some 40 to 50 WiFi stations in the harbor from all the marinas, restaurants and places selling shirts and stuff. Most were transmitting on channel 1, 6 or 11. I was getting sporadic service with the way the modem was originally set up so I looked for an empty channel slot and found channel 4 free. Usually you can reset the transmitting channel via the browser window to the modem but not for Xfinity. I called the office for technical support and he reset the WiFi channel to number 4. The reception by our various tablets and phones was like night and day, 20 to 25 Mbps where before I was getting 3 to 5 at best and often nothing at all. I just wonder how many people would know to do that and would just blame the modem for the problem?

Key West is starting to get busier downtown but the marina is starting to have empty slips now. Perhaps there are some that are finally getting over to the Bahamas but I don't really know.

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