Photon Wi-Fi dev kit startup

I recently went to run my Photon Wi-Fi dev kit and ran into a couple of issues that I thought I would share.

1. I could not get the Photon to connect to my Open-Mesh network, using either the Android app or Node CLI (more on that in a moment).  Reading the online doc under WiFi Network Requirements, I noticed "The Core is 802.11b/g. Most 802.11n networks are backwards compatible with 802.11b/g, but if yours is not, the device will not connect."  I had a Netgear WGR614 available, so setup up a dedicated WPA2 network.
2. As of this posting, there are some version compatibility issues around Node.js and serialport, which precluded me from using the Node CLI to configure the Photon network settings.  I still could not get the Android app to work.  Fortunately as described in this support issue,  you can use Putty to connect to the Photon via USB.  Enter "i" for device ID (needed to claim your device) and "w" to setup the Wi-Fi.  This just worked, no muss, no fuss.
3. When I tried to compile the "Blink an LED" sample app, I got a useless error message.  It was late and maybe they were doing server maintenance (the compiler runs in the cloud), because a day later it compiled just fine, as expected.

Not being able to connect to the Open-Mesh network on the property is really a show stopper, as my son's Li-Po powered Slash 4x4 short course truck would only take a few seconds to exceed the WRG614 range/coverage.