Daily Archives: October 14, 2015
Where The Heck Did This Come From?
For the last week or so, our temps have stayed in the high 80’s/low 90’s, with night temps in the high 50’s/low 60’s. Really nice overall.
Then last night, it dropped into the high 40’s, still OK. I just turned on the 2nd heater. But then today, out of nowhere, the high was 97, and tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 98 degrees. But our night temps are supposed to stay in the low 50’s. What the Heck?
If that holds, it will be the hottest day we’ve had since we got here the 25th of August. And even stranger is that after this two-day spike, the next few day’s go 89, 81, 80, 82, etc., all the way through next week, when it drops into the high 70’s. Now that’s the Fall I’m used to.
Apparently my stubborn Mule is now a dead Mule. It has just quit working all together. As I said the other day, after I swapped receivers, it was working fine. Then all of a sudden, it just died. I went out this afternoon, replaced the batteries, and moved the sensor a little closer to the street. But nothing.
“It’s dead, Jim”
BTW, in all the Star Trek TOS (The Original Series) episodes, Bones never actually says the words, “He’s dead, Jim”. Just like Bogie never actually says, “Play it again, Sam.” in Casablanca.
My new one should be in tomorrow (Thursday), but I probably won’t get it until Friday when the landowner’s son brings by our order.
Besides my new Mighty Mule Driveway Alarm system, I’ve got a few other goodies coming too.
The first one is a new power jack for my ASUS X53E laptop.
It’s become very hard to get the power plug in just the right position so it will charge the battery, so a replacement is in order. But the laptop has to be almost completely disassembled to get to the jack. And then the old one has to be unsoldered and the new one soldered back in.
Because something like this can end up being all day job, I’ll probably just try to keep the old one working until we’re off the gate, but have the replacement on hand in case it dies completely before then.
I also ordered another 3 pack of these lighted 8” extension cords.
Power Strip Liberator Lighted Extension Cord 3-Pack
Besides being a solution to the problem of a wall-wart power supply taking up two plug spaces, I keep one of these in my rig’s electrical bay as a pedestal power indicator. I plug one into the 20 amp socket and let it hang outside the pedestal cover. This way, if the power goes off in the rig, I can just look outside to see if it’s a park problem before I check further.
And of course, I ordered another of those great KJL Cree LED 900 lumens Flashlights before the price goes up again.
That was the original order I placed on Tuesday to be here on Thursday. But then this afternoon I was playing with my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28 camera. We’ve had this one since the beginning of 2009 and it’s been a real workhorse. But a couple of months ago it fell off the seat (I say it jumped) and broke off the little button that lets you look at the picture you just took on the display screen.
The FZ28 is 10MP with an 18X optical and 4X digital zoom, really good specs for 7 years ago (I didn’t realize it had been that long until I counted it up). It replaced an earlier Lumix model that I had for 3 or 4 years before that.
So I decided to check Amazon for a replacement, once again looking at the Panasonic Lumix line since I’d had such great luck with them. And this is what I decided on.
Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ70 16.1 MP Digital Camera with 60x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
As the link says, it has a 16.1 MP sensor with a 60x optical zoom, over 3 times better than my old one. It also has a 5x digital zoom, which under good lightning conditions, can give you an effective zoom of 300x.
Wow! Definitely going to need a tripod, or at least a monopod, for that.
I also ordered a Class 10 (fast!) 128 GB memory card to go with the new camera. The 32 GB one in my old camera will hold over 5000 photos, so nominally this new one will hold about 20,000. But since the photo file size will be larger due to the 16 MP’s, maybe 12,000 to 15,000 is a better estimate. We’ll see.
I paid $8.98 to get Next Day shipping on these two items, so it will all come in together with tomorrow’s delivery. And in Amazon’s inimitable style, I ordered these about 15 minutes before the cut-off time for Next Day delivery, and about 30 minutes later I got an email saying the camera and card had been shipped. Nice!
New Toys in the mail!
_________________________________________________
Thought for the Day:
“…though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least definitively inaccurate.” – Douglas Adams
fgsdfg
