My wife and I arrived in Panama on April 1st at about 7:00 PM on Copa. These were free tickets which they had given us for giving up our seats to other people who were in a bigger hurry than we were on a previous trip. Some may disqualify us as hitchhikers because we travel so heavy, as we carry a lot more than just a towel - we had shipped 200 kilos of computers and other necessary stuff via air freight. But the freight department was already closed for the day. So we went to our temporary digs and got a much-needed rest.

This is not a great rest, though, because Panamanians are enchanted with their horns and blow them all night long as they drive by. I've never heard so much horn-honking anywhere in all my life.

The next day, I inquired about getting our stuff. I found a taxi pickup truck and we went to the airport. The driver's name is Dumas, and yes he has read The Three Musketeers, in Spanish of course. We get to the Copa Freight building, and I pay 25 Balboas to get a slip of paper which customs will sign, allowing us to get our stuff out of storage. If you're not familiar with the Panamanian monetary system, it's really simple: Balboas are US dollars. They just call them Balboas. Then we go to the customs building, and customs gets a copy of my passport, and stamps the paper with a note to inspect our stuff. Then we go back to Copa and get the boxes. No one had entered into the computer where the boxes were, so the fork lift muchacho had to drive back and forth with several different palettes until he found the right one.

Then we go through customs. They had a cursory look while Dumas flirted with the one female customs agent. They saw that I was not a rich Gringo, didn't have any new stuff, and let me through. They didn't open the box with the oscilloscope, spectum analyzer, and WiFi radios though, which I was a little worried about. They're all pretty old, but still they might have tried to get something just because of the CRT's. I voiced this to Dumas, but he tells me that ten Balboas would have covered anything.

We decide to take the freeway on the way back because it looked like it might rain, so Dumas flirted with the female toll booth workers, asking them if they were already married. He was so excited about one of them that he almost drove off without getting 18 Balboas in change from the toll.

Dumas was a lot of fun the whole trip, knew all the customs guys and many other people, and kept up a lively banter with everyone the whole time. I gave him a ten Balboa tip because I knew it would have been a lot more difficult without him. My Spanish is pretty good after five years in Costa Rica, but having a friendly local with you is invaluable in dealings with officials in any country. He gave me his card, and I told him that I would be calling him again if I need a pickup truck.

All of our stuff arrived safely and was in the room, so it was on to the next big priority: getting an Internet connection.

My Mini-ITX system booted just fine, nothing had gotten banged around too badly. The hotel has free Internet and advertises their WiFi access; that's one of the reasons we chose it. But it took a lot of time to get the connection working right. We are on the third floor in a corner apartment over the aparthotel office, right in Panama City. There is a WiFi access point somewhere in the office, although no one knows where it is and I couldn't see it.

Anyway, I spent an hour or so putting my LinkSys radio with DLink firmware in different places, using the Site Explore function (not present in the LinkSys firmware). I finally found one place where it would connect with the downstairs, although the first connection yielded more than 50% packet loss. After fiddling with it for several hours and trying different arrangements, I finally got it down to .25% packet loss. It's hanging out the window in the rear corner. Then it was a process of figuring out the network. I used tcpdump, and finally saw enough packets go by that I found the default gateway, 192.xx.yy.84.

Of course the best position for the radio would have to be the point farthest from where we want the computers, back by the hot water heater. The computers are near the window airconditioner in the living room. So instead of stringing a Cat5 cable across the living room, and since I have a couple more radios, I decided to try another wireless link. Setting the LinkSys up as a repeater didn't work, since the building is a high-rise and made of solid concrete and steel; the repeated signal won't penetrate. So I used two more LinkSys WAP11 radios with the stock firmware to make a point-to-point connection. These are on channel 11; the other link is on channel 6, so it's non-overlapping.

What I end up with is a pretty decent connection. I tested the speed with an online service, and I get up to 260K download and 128K upload. This weekend there were problems, which seem to have fixed themselves this morning. The connection sometimes goes away for five minutes, but then comes back again.

But, it's not my radio links, it's somewhere in the cable network, probably some router weirdness because there are a lot of duplicate ping packets. I'm not going to complain because it's free, 24/7, and in our apartment; but I hope my eventual connection in our own apartment will be better.

I spent about twelve hours doing this, but it's worth it. The internet cafe is really bad, running a proprietary browser in 800x600 mode. You can't even open up a second browser window!

Anyway, I am now ready to start taking over the country with Linux. There is no active Linux User's Group that I can find, but there are some Linux courses at one of the universities. I am also looking forward to being able to post more consistently on A42; it's been very difficult with the amount of travel we've been doing lately. And there's a lot going on with Linux and everything else that I haven't had time to post.