Daily Archives: September 16, 2016

Three Neats and Two Peeves . . .

First up, Piper had surgery on her recently-broken arm this morning, and everything went fine.

Don’t know yet how long she’ll have to have her cast on, but if it’s like it was when she broke it two years ago, she’s also looking at several months of physical therapy with it.

Piper's Broken Arm

That hurts just looking at it.

I put in a call to Colaw RV Salvage outside Carthage, MO this morning trying to locate a new (used, but new to me) screen door latch for our rig. As I mentioned, American Coach no longer stocks them, so Colaw was my next bet.

The guy muttered for a few minutes and then said that he didn’t have them in stock. So I reminded him that out in his back lot, he has an American Eagle (like ours) and an American Dream, both of our vintage, and could he please have someone check to see if there is one still on the door jam of either coach.

He was kind of curious how I knew that they had those two, so I told we’d been there and bought parts off the Eagle, and that several body panels for our blowout repair last year came off it too. He said he’d have someone check it out and get back to me, but I haven’t heard anything yet.

My Plan B on this is to have my son Chris bend me one up out of aluminum stock and drill a couple of holes in it, but I’ll wait to hear from Colaw first.

If you haven’t been to Colaw’s, you need stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

Colaw RV Salvage

The rig’s out front are for sale, but in back are hundreds of wreck/burnt RV’s. They have golf carts for you to drive around back there, and maps to show you what rigs are where. Neat!

I’m really liking our new Samsung TV more and more, and I’m still discovering all the neat stuff it can do. I spent a while this morning playing around with it, trying different things, the first of which was the Screen Mirroring function.

Any it only took about 10 seconds to have my Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 displaying on the TV screen.

New TV Mirroring

Not exactly sure what I’ll use it for, but it is neat.

Another neat thing is that you can never lose the manual. It’s built right into the TV. Just hit the ‘E-Manual’ button on the remote and there it is on the screen. You can search through it, scroll through it, however you want. Another neat.

Of course, you can also download a computer copy if you want, which brings me to my first peeve. When you download the manual file, this is what you get.

ENG-US-NMATSCJ-1.104-0410.pdf

Why in the He . . . Heck can’t what it’s for be in the file name? Not only can’t you tell what model of TV it’s for, you can’t even tell it’s FOR a TV, period.

I see this all time when downloading manuals and such, and there’s no excuse for it. Depending on your directory path length, you’ve got a couple of hundred characters to play with.

Why can’t it be something like –

SAMSUNG_SMART_TV_5200_ENG-US-NMATSCJ-1.104-0410.pdf?

That’s got something for everyone, and I don’t have to rename it. Otherwise I won’t remember what the file is for next week, much less in six months.

Now on to peeve two. The remote is too small for the number of buttons it has.

Samsung Remote

Count-wise it has a few more buttons than our DirecTV remote, but it’s a good bit smaller. Plus the up, down, right, left arrow function needs to be separated out somewhat so that it’s easier to find in dim light.

PPA_Logo

The buttons are just too small and too jammed together, so it’s not a very ergonomic design. They should have taken a cue from the DirecTV one. It’s much more user-friendly.

After two fairly busy days on the gate, today we only had 42 vehicles come through. So that was nice, but of course to balance it out, at 95 degrees it was kind of hot. It’s looks like our Fall weather that was forecast last week, with highs in the low 80’s and lows in the high 60’s went back into hiding, since we’re now looking at low to mid 90’s for the next 10 days or so.

But on the plus side, tomorrow’s Blue Moon BBQ day, so that makes it all better.


Thought for the Day:

The four most beautiful words in our common language: 
I told you so. – Gore Vidal

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