Our RV Adventures

Winter is here for a while, at least. It never got out of the 40’s yesterday and was down to 39° last night. Today was another 40’s day and then down to 35° tonight.

And along with the cold temps, we have the possibility of snow flurries tonight and tomorrow. It’s already snowing north of here, up in Huntsville and Livingston, and in south Texas around Tilden and Cotulla.

A little before 1pm this afternoon I got an email alert from UpTimeRobot saying my client’s websites were down. Putting in a call to the office I found the Internet part of their Spectrum service was down, but the phone part was still working. That would normally mean that their Internet Sever was down. And in about 10 minutes it was all back up.

Later in the afternoon a Galveston County Animal Control truck showed up here in the park, checking out the residence right across the fence. I say ‘residence’, but that’s only if you think that 3 or 4 trashy-looking single-wides, a bunch of abandoned cars, and a lot of trash scattered around constitutes a ‘residence’, then I guess it’s a ‘residence’.

We didn’t call them, but we were about to.  There’s a dog that pretty much stays outside on a long chain, spending hours a day just barking. The other day when we had all the rain he was just standing the water with no place to lay down. And I think he was outside all last night when it was in the 40’s, but I’m not sure.

We talked to the Animal Control lady and she said there was nothing she could. The dot has a little lean-to covering, and he had food, water, and long chain. And that’s all they need to be legal. Apparently even being outside in the rain and cold is OK as long as he has shelter.

About 3:45 we headed out to meet friends at the La Brisa (The Breeze) Mexican Restaurant over on Hwy 146. But we made a first stop at the Victory Lakes HEB for gas. Fuel prices have been dropping pretty steadily the last couple of weeks, six cents in the last few days, down to $2.03.

We were meeting up with Wil and Cyndy Olsen who we last saw this past summer while we were both in the Rapid City, SC area. Right now they’re marooned up in Baytown while their truck is being rebuilt after an accident.

We had hoped to also meet up with Jan and Dale Thompson, but Jan was under the weather so we’ll have to reschedule.

In their spare time Wil and Cyndy guide RV caravans for Adventure Caravans, recently returning from a Maritimes tour of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. And they get paid for this too. Nice work.

Jan had the Pechuga Monterey, a chicken breast covered with grilled mushrooms and Monterey Jack cheese. Her favorite.

I got the Beef Fajita Taco Salad with Queso as a dressing. La Brisa has some of the best tasting fajita meat around.

Along with eating we spent a couple of hours catching up with all our adventures, more of theirs than ours.

One of our blog readers wondered how the aliens were supposed to play the Golden Record on Voyager. Well, NASA thinks of everything. Including with the record a stylus (needle) and a pictorial drawing showing how it  should be played and at what speed, essentially 16-2/3 rpm.

I forgot to mention that the Voyager probably won’t function much past 2025 because the radioactive batteries that power the craft will be too weak to allow continued operation.

Referencing all the different types and styles of music encoded on the disk, Steve Martin, on Saturday Night Live, said that the aliens had responded to the record with four words, “Send More Chuck Berry”.

I guess even aliens know good music.

The Word of the Day is:  Maieutic

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I spent most of the day at work helping the Spectrum VOIP tech get our phone system working again. The problem started early this morning when apparently Spectrum tried update the firmware in their router and our phones. And it did not go well.

Not at all.

When the office manager came in this morning, we had no phones whatsoever, not even a dial tone. And maybe even worse, when someone called in, it would ring once, and then give the caller what sounded like a Bronx cheer, you know, Brrrrraaaatttt.

The first thing we found was that the Spectrum router had been ‘bricked’, i.e. dead. It would not even turn on. This is what can happen when a firmware update goes wrong.

Once we found that, we were dead in the water because the tech guy didn’t have a spare on his truck, and it was a couple of hours before he came back with one. Then with a new router in place, we took a look at the four phones. And they weren’t much better off.

Like the router, one of the phones was also ‘bricked’, but luckily he did have a spare one with him, and the other three were fine after we rebooted them.

When in doubt, reboot.

So, after almost 4 hours, we finally had a working phone system again.

One thing did come out of going in to work today, my new toy came in. A TP-Link Smart Switch

Using it, you can control AC devices from either your phone, or link it to your Alexa Echo, Echo Dot, or Google Home and control them by just asking Alexa to turn them on and off for you.

And if you don’t have an Echo or a Dot, you can also get an Echo Dot with TP-Link Switch for only $5 more that the cost of the Dot alone.

Setup turned out to be pretty easy.

1. First up, download the ‘Kasa for Mobile’ app on your phone.

2. Connect your phone to a ‘2.4 GHz’ WiFi network. This is the one that gets a lot of people messed up. Most RV’ers use some kind of MiFi in their rigs and everyone I’ve seen defaults to the 5 GHz setting. not the 2.4 GHz one. So the Smart Switch will not see it when the time comes.

And again, most MiFi’s also have a 2nd WiFi account called a Guest account, which is normally not turned on, and it can be set for either 2.4 or 5 GHz. So turn the Guest account on and set it for 2.4 GHz. When you now look at your WiFi signals, you will now see a new signal to connect to, using a new password that your MiFi will give you.

Then it’s just a matter of following the instructions on the Kasa app, and in just a few minutes you will be able to control your device from your phone.

And it only takes a few minutes more to link it to your Alexa/Dot, and then you can just ask Alexa to turn on your device(s).

A neat toy.

Voyager I, launched in 1977, is now over 13 billion miles from Earth, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled. And it’s still ticking, sending back data on a regular schedule. Of course as far away as it is, it takes that data over 19 HOURS to get back to Earth.

But to keep this data flowing, Voyager needs to keep its parabolic antenna pointed toward the Earth, And to do this it’s periodicly using its Attitude Control Thrusters to aim it in our direction. But after over 40 years of use, they’re starting to get a little flakey.

So NASA engineers decided to try using the craft’s trajectory correction maneuver thrusters, last used in 1980 for a course correction. And in a great example of NASA craftsmanship, the thrusters fired up and worked perfectly. After 37years!

Of course it took over 38 hours, 19 hours out and 19 hours back, before they knew the thrusters had worked.

Now that’s a long distance call.

You may remember that Voyager was one of the spacecraft that was carrying The Golden Record, containing photos and audio greeting as well as music.

One of the photos illustrated a galactic map locating the Earth in relation to known pulsars, essentially 14 interstellar beacons to guide aliens to the Earth. At the time, a number of scientist said it wasn’t really a good idea to give the aliens a guidebook back to us.

In fact a famous cartoon at the time (a cartoon I couldn’t find a copy of) showed a group of aliens using the Record as a takeout menu.

“To Serve Man”

“It’s A Cookbook!”

The Word of the Day is:  Gleek

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