Our RV Adventures

After some of Jan’s delicious Bacon and Egg Homemade Biscuits sandwiches, Jan and I headed east about 11:15am to meet with a client in Pasadena about 1pm

Before we left, I configured the Waze app on my Galaxy Tab 4.for our route. Waze is a free GPS mapping program for your phone or tablet, Android or iPhone. Developed by an Israeli firm, and bought up by Google in 2013. it now ties in with their map databases for much better coverage. But the real neat thing about Waze is the crowd-sourced map updates. in fact your Waze map display is connected to all the other Waze users in your area.

The way it works is that as Waze users encounter road hazards, obstacles, or situations, they mark it on their map. They do this either manually by touching the map at their location, and then selecting the applicable icon from this list. Or you can even do this by voice command, I believe.

The Waze map display is a little less ‘mappy’ and a little more ‘cartoonish’ than other programs, but still very usable.

Note off to the left, ‘2’ people have reported a police presence, and at the top, ‘2’ people have reported a traffic jam.

It’s really neat to see a police car icon ahead of you, and then you top the hill and there he is. A neat program.

Check it out.

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We got to my first client’s just about 1pm, and spent some time catching up. Tricia’s been a client/friend since before we started RV’ing, and today’s visit is my usual yearly checkup on her computers.

Last year we replaced her desktop unit due to the hard drive dying. With the age of the computer, it made more sense to just upgrade to a new one rather than put $$$ into an old one. But this year everything is fine, and she’s doing a good job keeping her system scanned for viruses and malware.

We did talk about possibly adding a Wi-Fi range extender to her system for better coverage in the front of the house. In the back bedroom where the Wi-Fi router lives, Speedtest.net shows a good 15 Mbps on my Galaxy Tab. But at the front of the house, the speed has dropped down to about 7.5 Mbps, and she seems to have more trouble streaming movies up there. So I’ll give her some ideas and let her know.

Before I left I also reconfigured her My Passport backup drive for continuous, rather than timed backups. This will give her a little extra security at no noticeable loss of performance.

As we were leaving, I mentioned I was going to another client’s just a few miles away, and in another of those ‘Small World’ things, it turns out they know each other.

We got to my next client a little after 3pm, and after catching with Jean, another pre-RV’ing client, I got to work fixing up a number of small problems  on her ASUS laptop. She was worried about malware, so I downloaded and installed SuperAntiSpyware  and Malwarebytes, my go-to programs for this problem. Or at least I tried to.

I started the 29 MB download of SuperAntiSpyware, and when it wasn’t done in a minute or so, I looked closer, and the download time was going to be 32 minutes.

WTH!

So I stopped the download and went to Speedtest.net to check out their speed  And it was hard to believe what I found.

AT&T was giving them a blazing 0.45 Mbps download speed. And even better, a 0.02 upload speed. And no, those aren’t typos. My 9 year old Verizon 3G aircard gives me over 6 times what their AT&T hardwire system is giving them.

I might have blamed the router, but they actually have two routers in their house, and both gave the same results. I wish I had had an Ethernet cable with to check out the direct connection speed, but I doubt it would have been any different.

I told Jerry he needs to get on the phone with AT&T; and give them a stern talking to.  Tricia, only few miles away, is also on AT&&T and as I noted, gets 15 Mbps, over 30 times faster.

To take care of my download situation right now, I hotspotted my Galaxy S5 to the laptop and download both files in less than 30 seconds total.

Jean also wanted to update a Dell laptop running Vista to Win7, which is about as far as you can go, since Dell never published any drivers for it for Win8/8.1 or 10. But looking at the computer, I suggested we do a clean install of Win7 instead of laying it on top of her old Vista OS, so she’s going to make a list of what she wants to save off, before we do that.

By the time we finished up, it was almost 5pm, and not wanting to get stuck in Houston going-home traffic, Jan and I had a nice leisurely dinner at a nearby Texas Roadhouse.

Both our steaks, Jan’s Sirloin and my Ribeye were delicious, and the company was great too.

Besides the good steaks, another thing I like about Texas Roadhouse is the buckets on the table. Every restaurant should have a bucket on the table.

Now at Texas Roadhouse, the bucket is primarily for your peanut shells, but it’s also the perfect place for your empty sweetener packets, used lemon wedges (I don’t like to drop them in my tea), the papers encircling your silverware, the little cups for your salad dressing, and butter, and the coffee creamer containers, in other words, all the flotsam and jetsam that ends up littering your table as the meal progresses.

In the good old days you had an ash tray on the table that would somewhat fill the void, but that’s no more. So I want a bucket.

Or I’ll just start bring my own.

By the time we finished up, the traffic had subsided somewhat, so we headed home. Well, headed home with a stop at the Katy Wal-Mart, before finally getting back to the rig about 9:30.

Tomorrow is definitely a stay-at-home-do-nothing day.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” –  William Pitt (the Younger), Speech in the House of Commons, November 18, 1783

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Jan and I pretty much took the day off today, and did pretty much nothing. All in all, a very nice day. I didn’t even work on my AC problem.

I did make a stop by Barbara’s, the park ranger who was looking for a new refrigerator. She found one at Lowe’s and it’s being delivered tomorrow. Unfortunately Jan and I will be in Pasadena while I take care of a couple of computer clients so I won’t be able to help out, but I told her I’d check in with her on Tuesday. And I still want to take a look at a taillight problem she’s having.

For the last couple of days I noticed that our usual 3 bars of Verizon 4G had been replaced by 2 bars of 3G. But then today it all changed.

Around noon I happened to look at the signal strength graphic on my Galaxy S5 and saw that I now had 5 bars of 4G. So to check out what I suspected, I ran the SpeedTest app on my phone and WOW!

XLTE has now come to Columbus, TX, and the Colorado River Thousand Trails. At 48.51 Mbps, that’s over 5X the speed here the last time I checked. And the upload speed is about 10X before. Very Nice!

Recently whenever I tried to update programs on my Galaxy Tab 4, I would get a “Insufficient Storage Space” notice. I would go through and delete some seldom-used programs, and then finally I could get my updates. But it kept getting worse.

This was especially galling since when I looked at my memory, it showed I still had almost 750 MB of storage space. But then it was Google to the rescue.

Apparently the Android OS is a little weak on keeping a program’s cached data cleaned up. So the fix is to go through each program in the Application Manager and clear the cache.

Or, much easier, you can just download the App Cache Cleaner from the Play Store and let it take care of it for you. And even better, it’s free.

Check it out.

As we’ve traveled back and forth on I-10 just outside Katy for the last few years, we’ve always checked out the Hamilton Metals scrolling sign. 

For the last several years the sign has displayed the latest price of a barrel of oil, the latest price of a mBtu of natural gas, and the weekly rig count. And they’ve all been falling off a cliff. Among other things, Hamilton supplies drill pipe and casing to the oil industry, so they also have stake in the prices.

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I  remember a couple of years ago, the rig count was up over 2000, but the last time I saw the count it was 419.

How the mightily have fallen.

But somebody at Hamilton has a sense of humor. A sarcastic sense of humor, maybe. But a sense of humor, anyway.

When we were traveling here to Colorado River from Lake Conroe a week ago, the sign no longer listed any counts. It just said, “WE’LL START REPORTING AGAIN WHEN IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE!”

And yesterday, coming back from Brandi’s, it said, “WILL TRADE PIPE FOR FOOD!”

Like I said, a sarcastic sense of humor.

Thought for the Day:

Have you always seen how cute baby bear cubs are, and thought you might want to have one as a pet,

and then you think about how they’ll grow up and eat your face?

Well then, check out one of these. Believe it or not, it’s a dog.

A Shepherd-Akita-Corgi Mix.

And that’s full-grown so it probably won’t eat your face.

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