Daily Archives: May 28, 2017
Some Random Stuff . . .
The last time we were in Billings, MT a number of years ago, there were a small number of casinos/bars/restaurants around the town, but nothing of any size.
But this recent visit they were everywhere, and bigger and fancier. And almost all of them out of business. So I don’t know if they overbuilt too fast, or just had more casinos than they had people who wanted to gamble. But it’s strange.
A few days ago, after our Buffalo Wild Wings visit, we got our truck washed at the Parkway Car Wash just off downtown RC. They did a great job of pre-spraying the front of the vehicle to get the fine spray of diesel oil off. We always get this blowby when we’re traveling in the mountains and using our Pacbrake a lot. But hopefully we’re pretty much out of the mountains for this year.
BTW I’ve found in talking to a number of people that they don’t think their Pacbrake does much, or even works at all. And, if they aren’t using it very often, and/or not performing the lubrication maintenance on the system, it’s very possible it has jammed up and it isn’t working. But there is a very easy way to check your Pacbrake.
In most cases, when your Pacbrake is turned on and you let off the gas, the system downshifts into 4th gear, and then engages the Pacbrake. So it can be hard to tell what part of the resulting slowdown is caused by the downshifting and what part is caused by the Pacbrake.
So on a hill of decent size, go ahead and downshift into 4th on your own. Then about 10 seconds later, turn on your Pacbrake and let off the gas. If you feel an additional slowdown, then your Pacbrake is working. If you feel nothing extra, then it’s probably not, and you need to have it checked out.
A few days ago I got an email hack I wanted to warn you about. It was supposedly from ‘USAA Bank alerts’ with the Subject ‘New banking autnification system’ And yes, that’s the way it was spelled. Bad grammar and typos are always a good clue that an email is not authentic.
Note that the real From: address is ‘[email protected]’ and has nothing to do with USAA. And if you put your mouse on the ‘Click here to get started’ button or the ‘usaa.com/contact-us’ link at the bottom of the text, it takes you to here:
www.birosagsec.webgrafika.hu/profiles/success/usaa-alerts
With a .hu country code for Hungary, it’s probably not from USAA.
So let’s be careful out there!
Wrapping up with the Jetpack MiFi data problem I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve got more info on the amount of data I’m supposedly using.
In the past, on my 3G aircard, I’ve consistently used 20 to 25 GB a month, very seldom varying more than a couple of GB’s. But the past two months since I got the MiFi, I used up 10GB in the first 7 seven days, and then was throttled back to 3G speeds.
So at that point, both last month and this, I switched over to hotspotting from my new Galaxy S8+. And in a little over two weeks I still haven’t quite used 10GB of 4G yet.
So explain to me why I use data more than twice as fast on my MiFi as I do on my S8+? For the same stuff.
Seems kind of suspicious to me.
And of course there’s the problem of the fact that the 3G speeds I get throttled back to when I’ve used up my 10GB of 4G, is slower than the 3G I can get on my aircard that I still have, 660 kbps vs. 1.1Mbps. And this is at the very same time from the same location.
I smell a rat!
Thought for the Day:
Life can be bumpy, so let’s put our tray tables and seatbacks in their full upright position—and enjoy the ride.
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