after a salad and chocolate milk for lunch, i biked down to the cafe in the afternoon to try and debug the malfunctioning wyze cams at my sister's place. i can only see the video streams intermittently, even on local wifi. as a test, i set up a 3rd camera, and put two pan cams right next to the router. even then it had problems streaming. later back at home i discovered some people who had problems connecting their wyze cams to an asus RT-AC68U router. there are certain settings i can try tomorrow.

i'm going to return the IMINOVO light/PIR motion sensor LED night light when it arrives tomorrow because i discovered a cheaper solution: a motion sensing light bulb in a simple utility clamp light. i had one in my basement that i brought to the cafe. i used the radar bulb i got from my sister yesterday. because it uses radar instead of infrared, it's super sensitive and can sense through walls, and was suitable for my sister's place, but in the basement it was a perfect fit. walking around upstairs won't trigger it, but coming downstairs, once you're within the light of sight, the light will immediately turn on. a simple solution to a simple problem.

the other thing i did today was attend a branding consultation at 3pm. it's a requirement as part of cambridge's small business grant program. it was a complete waste of time however, spent two hours listening to my sister blather to a trio of branding consultants: a social media expert, a graphic designer, and somebody else who's job i wasn't quite clear on. two of them were millennials, the third as well. they talked about SEO and taking control of your branding and mentioned instagram every other sentence. "you don't have to post something everyday, like three times a week is fine." they represent everything i hate. i did learn one thing: that you can actually get a job being on instagram all day. one of the girls said it like it was a badge of honor instead of a tremendous waste of time playing a virtual popularity game. while my sister chatted away like a moron, i said very little and kept a stone face. while i just wanted the meeting to be over, my sister seemed to enjoy the sound of her own voice. at one point i made a bet that she would eventually bring up her dog, and sure enough, before the meeting finished, she mentioned she had a dog and had to show everyone a photo. i will never attend another one of these meetings as long as i live. i'm going to imagine it never happened.

after the meeting i set up a second wyze cam at the cafe with the newly-arrived usb extension cord. it replaced the rear foscam, which worked well enough, but the wyze has more fancy features (like recording). one problem we discovered was that while the pan cam has great near 360° view, it doesn't have very good vertical POV. i had to tilt the camera on the base in order to see all of the back of the cafe, but that meant see less of the parking lot once the camera was turned the other way.

i then went to my sister's place to troubleshoot her cameras again, once i noticed they were offline again. i even updated the router, hoping that would fix the problem, but it didn't. i finally gave up, returned to the cafe, gathered up my things, and biked home. by then it was close to 6pm. when i logged into the wyze app, i noticed the cafe cams were all down. the only cam that was up was the front door cam at my sister's place, and it was only on intermittently.

for dinner i ate another third of the fried chicken from last night, whipping up a quickly sweet and sour sauce to mix with the chicken. i still have another third left but i'm all chickened out, i'm looking to eat something different tomorrow.

one good thing that happened today was i found my lost grocery bag. it was just a few houses down, on the side of the road, tossed with some leaves. i spotted the blue canvas right away.