Monthly Archives: September 2015
It’s Back!
Well, the package I sent off via USPS Priority Mail last week finally showed up in north Houston today, five days after it left Shreveport last Tuesday. So hopefully it will be delivered tomorrow down in Friendswood, but you never know.
At least it’s not still lost.
I ordered my second Mighty Mule Driveway Alarm about 11:30 last night. What’s kind of strange is that I ordered the first one last week on Sunday and it got here Tuesday. I ordered this one on Saturday and it’s coming in on Wednesday.
So the later I order, the earlier it gets here? Does that mean that if I keep going, it will get here before I even order it.
If so, that’s got drone delivery beat all to hell.
The other thing I ordered was this.
KJL Cree LED 900 lumens Flashlight
Right now Jan and I are using an UltraFire 300 lumen flashlight to check tags as vehicles come in at night, but sometimes it’s just not enough. With all the bad roads these guys travel on, the tags get really chewed up.
Yes, literally, some of them look like they’ve been chewed on. Plus in many cases, most or all of the reflective stuff has been worn off, so you need a lot of light. And hopefully this will do it.
It also may help me give some of these guys a brief lesson in ‘bright’ lights. There always few that leave their high beams on, no matter what, so maybe now I can give them a little taste of their own medicine.
Of course it may blind them and then they run me over, so I’ll have to think about it a little more.
A neat thing about this order is how I did it. I normally just stick things in my Amazon cart, and then at some point I place the order. But this time I told my Amazon Echo to place the order from me. And she did it perfectly.
I’ll have more info on the Echo soon, but I will say it’s one of my favorite gadgets of all time.
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Thought for the Day:
In my optimistic moments, I think that we verge on total chaos. But usually I’m not that optimistic.
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Summer’s Back . . .
Well, Summer’s back, apparently with a vengeance. That cooling-off that was supposed to come through on Monday, dropping temps back into the high 80’s, low 90’s went somewhere else, because now it’s mid to high 90’s as far as the eye can see. Of course that could change too.
Maybe it’s like talking about a possible no-hitter during the ball game and jinxing it.
Today was a little quieter than usual, with only 90 vehicles coming in, as opposed to the usual 120 – 130 we’ve been having recently. Don’t know if it was because it was the weekend or not, but it was nice anyway.
Right before I came on at 1pm, I went down and permanently installed my Mighty Mule Driveway Alarm system, using the plastic fence post I picked up from Tractor Supply on Friday.
Here’s what it looks like directly from the side.
Originally I had the transmitter hanging from one of the vines, but it wasn’t waterproof that way and was more visible.
Here’s what it looks like as you’re coming toward it.
The reason I’m trying to hide it somewhat is that a couple of years ago I had one like this stolen.
Don’t know what they could do with it without the receiver that it talks to, but $80 walked away. Ouch!
Because the sensor/transmitter are in one unit, the whole thing needs to be right beside the roadway, and it’s very visible.
But with the Mighty Mule, the sensor and the transmitter are two separate units separated by a 12 ft. cable. And the sensor itself is pretty inconspicuous. It’s that black pipe at the bottom of the first photo.
So far the Mighty Mule has a perfect record. It’s never missed a vehicle coming by it, and it’s never false alarmed. You can’t ask for any better than that.
On the false alarm question, I find I always enjoy reading the questions people ask about products on Amazon. In this case, the question was “Does the wind set it off?”, and the answer was, “Not unless the wind blows a car past it.”
There is one thing that bothers me about the unit though, and that’s the alarm sound.
It’s sharp.
No, not pointy sharp. Musically sharp.
The alarm sound is made up of four tones, three identical ones, and then a fourth, lower tone, like the opening four notes to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, i.e, G G G Eflat. But the alarm’s last tone is somewhere between an E and an F, and it just grates on my ears.
In a way I guess I’m kind of like Sheldon yelling at the mockingbird outside his office window that he accused of being tone deaf.
“Just pick a key and stick with it.”
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Thought for the Day:
Everyone has a right to be stupid. But politicians just abuse the privilege.
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