All is Irie with The Wirie

Over the last few months, Mark and Tim have been working extra hard on improving The Wirie and the website. From his nice, comfortable house in cold Massachusetts, Tim communicated over Skype with his brother Mark in the meager living space of Irie, located in the warm climate and pretty environments of the Caribbean. Together, they figured a whole bunch of stuff out and shared their thoughts and ideas during daily chat sessions. I helped by reviewing documents, writing some PR stuff and making Mark’s (sometimes frustrating) life a bit easier.

The result of our effort, time investment, research and team work is an improved Wirie ready for sale on the website (www.thewirie.com) and for the press. The new stainless steel bracket is custom made to fit horizontal and vertical poles as well as standard antenna mounts, a higher power 1000mW WiFi unit replaces the 500mW unit, the website focuses on Wirie use in the boating and the RV (recreational vehicle) world, Windows 7 got its own manual and the manuals for all the other operating systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac) are updated. The FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page is enriched with extra information, other long range WiFi solutions were researched, the product comparison chart has more competitors on it, our customer service department is constantly providing advice and help, more unsolicited testimonials show how pleased our customers are and many more positive changes have been made to the site and the business operation.

Mark and Tim also tested a new WiFi unit that claims to be 2 Watts and supports the N protocol. It didn’t take them long, however, to discover that the internet connections with this unit lack reliability and are actually weaker than the 1000mW unit when used with the more frequently available B and G protocols. They concluded to not use this unit until improvements are made and results show that it is indeed better than the unit we currently use in The Wirie.

Working from pretty places scattered through the Caribbean islands over the last months has been enjoyable enough, but now it is time for the “real world”! Once in St. Martin, Mark and I will have a full time job taking care of boat projects, getting our life back on track, earning some money doing random jobs, advertising The Wirie and running the business with Tim.

With this different kind of blog, I wanted to give some insight about what else is going on in this little boat and this big world of ours. It’s not all sightseeing, relaxing and fun here on Irie, although we can’t complain about this last week. Mark and I decided to go on vacation to Barbuda and actually try to relax a bit. We did succeed splendidly and even read a couple of books, until we found a great internet signal in front of an 11 mile deserted beach! Well, I guess the beach isn’t totally deserted, based on that one building a couple of miles down. That Wirie, I tell ya…